Introduction to CORBA

Print-friendly Version

Training Index

[ Short Course | Magercises | Download ]

The Java Developer Connection (JDC) presents a Short Course introducing the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) written by Java Software licensee, the MageLang Institute. A leading provider of Java technology training, MageLang has contributed regularly to the JDC since 1996.

The Magelang Institute has been dedicated to promoting the growth of the Java technology community through evangelism, education, and software since 1995. You can find out more about their activities, including community-driven FAQs and online learning, at JGuru.com

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) from the Object Management Group (OMG) provides a platform-independent, language-independent architecture for writing distributed, object-oriented applications. CORBA objects can reside in the same process, on the same machine, down the hall, or across the planet. The Java language is an excellent language for writing CORBA programs. Some of the features that account for this popularity include the clear mapping from OMG IDL to the Java programming language, and the Java runtime environment's built-in garbage collection.

This introductory course will give you an overall view of how CORBA works, how to write CORBA applications in the Java programming language, and illustrates Sun's Java 2 ORB implementation of CORBA as well as Inprise's VisiBroker for Java. The approach to presenting CORBA taken in this course is through an example stock trading application.

Concepts

After completing this module you will understand:

• The basic structure of a CORBA application
• Why the Java programming language is an ideal language for CORBA programming
• How to specify distributed object interfaces in IDL
• What areas of CORBA you should pursue for further study

Objectives

By the end of this module you will be able to:

• Write simple CORBA interfaces in IDL
• Use the Java classes generated by the IDL compiler
• Create CORBA client applications in the Java language
• Implement CORBA distributed objects in the Java language
• Find distributed objects at run time

Prerequisites

A general familiarity with object-oriented programming concepts and the Java programming language. If you are not familiar with these capabilities, see the Java Tutorial. The Magercises require the ability to modify and build simple Java programs.

About the Authors

Alex Chaffee is a Software Guru with MageLang Institute. As the Director of Software Engineering for EarthWeb, Alex co-created Gamelan (http://www.gamelan.com/), the official directory for the Java community. He has presented at numerous user-groups and conferences, written articles for several Java magazines, and contributed to the book "The Official Gamelan Java Directory."

Bruce Martin is one of the pioneers of distributed object systems and programming. At Sun Microsystems he was one of Sun's CORBA architects, and the primary author of five of the OMG's CORBA Services specifications. At Inprise Corporation, Bruce contributed to Inprise's first CORBA-based Application Server. Now, Bruce is a Software Guru with MageLang Institute. Bruce has written many papers and given talks on distributed systems, advanced transaction models, object-oriented programming, and distributed object technologies at academic conferences and industrial events.
( Chat with the authors on Thurs., Dec. 9)

Start the Short Course

Magercises

Return to Top of Page

Copyright © 1998-1999 MageLang Institute. All Rights Reserved.