Inter Process Communication

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Critically review the following techniques CORBA, SOAP, DCE and SOCKETS for inter-process communication

Technology and techniques for inter-process communication within a DIS have evolved considerably in recent years. Please critically review the following techniques CORBA, SOAP, DCE and SOCKETS for inter-process communication. And why certain methods are gaining popularity in industry and why others are losing. For better description, at least 1500 words are requested.

Solution:

CORBA

CORBA is a distributed object framework proposed by a consortium of hundreds of companies called the Object Management Group (OMG). The core of the CORBA architecture is the Object Request Broker (ORB) that acts as the object bus over which objects transparently interact with other objects located locally or remotely. A CORBA object is represented to the outside world by an interface with a set of methods. A particular instance of an object is identified by an object reference. The client of a CORBA object acquires its object reference and uses it as a handle to make method calls, as if the object is located in the client's address space. The ORB is responsible for all the mechanisms required to find the object's implementation, prepare it to receive the request, communicate the request to it, and carry the reply if any back to the client. The object implementation interacts with the ORB through either an Object Adapter (OA) or through the ORB interface.

• CORBA objects can be located anywhere on a network.
• CORBA objects can interoperate with objects written on other platforms.
• CORBA objects can be written in any programming language for which there is a mapping from IDL to that language.

Developers use CORBA to distribute applications across client-server, peer-to-peer, 3-tier, n-tier, Internet/Intranet etc. networks. Instead of having hundreds of thousands of lines of code running on mainframe computers with dumb terminals, smaller, more robust applications that communicate between file servers and workstations are now necessary. To keep this distribution of applications simple, a plug-and- play architecture is necessary to distribute the client-server (CS) applications.

And why certain methods are gaining popularity in industry and why others are losing?

There are a number of limitations to the existing component technologies, two of these ...