Integration of CORBA and WWW: Magic without Tricks


This paper illustrates  the integration of two technologies - ORBs 
(Object Request Brokers) and W3 (WWW-World Wide Web). These technologies 
can be considered as tools offering a  variety of  benefits for software 
development. The resulting effects are baffling but achieved via simple 
and effective methods - both attributes of a good magic trick. However, 
we will illustrate  that this piece of magic can be performed without the 
need for tricks, slides and concealment. 

In our approach HTML documents are used as user interface specifications 
for objects in an OMG/OMA environment. The documents are generated at 
runtime from OMG/IDL specifications which describe object interfaces. 
The documents contain links to an object constructor cgi script. This 
script issues dynamic request to the corresponding CORBA object 
implementations. The program also delivers the results in HTML.

The user can select an object implementation and the object 
constructor is called by the W3 browser. It transforms the IDL 
interface information from the CORBA interface repository into HTML 
representation of the server interface.  The HTML code is deliverd 
to the W3 browser. At this point the user can view  the interfaces 
represented in a W3 format.

Later the user makes a request while filling out data in the entry 
fields and begining an operation. The W3 browser calls the object 
constructor in the same manner as before and provides all the input
data (mainly the parameter values of the operation). The object 
constructor once again makes a DII call to the object implementation. 
The operation  will be executed if it exist otherwise the exception 
handling will transmit an error message. The result is to pass on in the 
same manner as before. It will also be represented in a  W3 browser 
format and so on...