OpenCorba: A Reflective Open Broker

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Ledoux

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Reflection '99 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Today, CORBA architecture brings the major industrial solution for achieving the interoperability between distributed software components in heterogeneous environments. While the CORBA project attempts to federate distributed mechanisms within a unique architecture, its internal model is not very flexible and seems not to be suitable for future evolutions. In this paper, we present OpenCorba, a reflective open broker, enabling users to adapt dynamically the representation and the execution policies of the software bus. We first expose the reflective foundations underlying the implementation of OpenCorba: i) metaclasses which provide a better separation of concerns in order to improve the class reuse; ii) a protocol which enables the dynamic changing of metaclass in order to allow run-time adaptation of systems. Based on this reflective environment, OpenCorba enables the adaptability of the internal characteristics of the broker in order to change its run-time behavior (e.g. remote invocation, IDL type checking, IR error handling). OpenCorba gives a clear example of the benefits of reflective middleware.