CORBA and WWW: On a Collision Course 
and The Object War Moves to the Web 

POSITION PAPER

John F. Buford, Ph.D.
Distributed Multimedia Systems Lab
University of Massachusetts Lowell
buford@cs.uml.edu
http://dmsl.cs.uml.edu/~buford

The web has achieved a global scale hypertext information system
building on a relatively simple protocol, server design,
and document model.  It is now expected to become a globally
distributed application delivery system, a globally distributed
transaction processing system, and a globally distributed
real-time multimedia content delivery system.

Industry and users will benefit if this transition can be
accomplished without splintering the web into a number of
different competing and proprietary designs to provide
this new functionality.  The use of existing standards can 
enhance this prospect and accelerate the process.

CORBA and CORBA Services provide important building blocks
for integrating existing information systems and building
rich distributed information and application systems.

Vendors and developer are beginning to combine these two 
technologies.  The web developer community will in the near
future have a choice between CGI, proprietary server interfaces 
such as NSI, CORBA, and networked OLE.  The relative
sophistication of CORBA and its growing support in industry
suggest that it will be a key tool for tieing distributed
applications into the web.   We believe that the CORBA
framework is a suitable foundation for service and
security management, an important area for organizations
that wish to use web servers for information management.

Some issues for the WWW camp:

1) utility of CORBAservices for evolving the web
2) security
3) service management and administration
4) openness of the server and client to multiple object frameworks
which are likely to exist in the near future
5) hybrid servers which use CORBA for intranet and
http for wide-area

Some issues for the OMG camp:

1) ORB scalability to large numbers of objects and object transactions
2) ORB performance in wide-area networks
3) Use of mobile code in CORBA

We have developed a web-compatible server that delivers HTML, SGML, and 
HyTime documents through an object-oriented interface.  Some of our previous 
research is described in the references below.  

One area of evolution for WWW is real-time multimedia content delivery.
Some substantial protocol and interface design work has already 
been done in this area, notably the IMA's Multimedia Systems Services
model and the ISO MPEG-2 DSM-CC standard.  Both of these designs
use OMG IDL to describe the interfaces.

References (more citations at http://dmsl.cs.uml.edu/~buford)

[1] J. Buford. HyTime: Evaluation and Implementation Experience.
ACM Hypertext 96.  March 1996.

[2] L. Rutledge, J. Buford, R. Price.
Mobile Objects and the HyOctane Distributed Hyperdocument Server.
IMC 96. Feb. 1996.

[3] J. F. K. Buford (ed.)  Multimedia Systems. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley 1994.