Distributed OO programming on the Web
Although Distributed Object Oriented Programming is an increasingly popular programming model, its applications are largely confined to Local Area Networks , are seldom interconnected and up to now never deployed over the internet.
Recent technological advances are rapidly changing this situation :
Combining Java and ORB technology provides a very good answer to these scalability issues but it introduces problems of its own like how to circumvent browsers security restrictions and how to cross firewalls.
BlackWidow - a java based ORB that we developed at Post|Modern - demonstrates that a complete solution for these problems exists. It also demonstrates that deployment over the Web is feasible without requiring any changes to browsers or usual security practices. We believe however that substantial performance improvement could be achieved if standard bodies like the W3C worked on making the Web infrastructure more ORB and IIOP aware.