Engineering analysis and literature review of the use of CORBA in distributed object-oriented systems

This note was written based upon review of many papers, articles, and text books at time when we had little experience with an actual CORBA product. Some of the references conflicted with each other, and we now see that some of the comments made by other authors were misunderstandings or wrong. The product that we are currently using (and many others) do not implement all of CORBA - in fact, it is obvious that there is a great deal more to add to CORBA to meet all of the goals and expectations summarized herein. With all of its capability and promised advantage, CORBA is a complex package of technologies and products which requires quite a concentrated effort to master. We have developed a Test Package which to date has been used to send and receive data from up to 12 Servers on up to 5 computers in our office network, with up to 1000 objects per server. The data is expressed in all available IDL types including long arrays and unbounded strings. Performance measurements have established solid data upon which we can base estimates and models of the performance of the communication layer of the overall system after further design and prototyping on the frameworks and applications has been completed (see CORBA Test Package, ref. 14)