A Platform-Centric Framework for the Web Exposure and Orchestration of Distributed Objects

Many of the current service-oriented architectures are built on top of distributed object technologies. These technologies have, however, lost most of their initial appeal, mainly due to the inability to port their concepts to the World Wide Web, and to provide interoperability across many different platforms. The porting of these distributed object platforms to the current Web Service standard is, however, a costly process that requires high investments of both time and money. This paper presents OHMS, a framework that provides an easy and not resource consuming way of exposing a platform to the Web, thus enabling Web access, business-to-business interaction and service composition, by the means of orchestration. We address the framework´s architecture, its implementation, and the support for orchestrating CORBA platforms. We evaluate the work regarding the initial requirements, the effort required to support a given distributed object technology, and performance issues. We also address the application of OHMS to a real-life scenario.