The design of a CORBA group communication service

The common object request broker architecture (CORBA) is becoming a standard for distributed application middleware, and there are increasing needs for enriching the basic functionalities of CORBA. While mechanisms for persistence, transactions, event channels, etc. have been designed and specified for CORBA, no standard support is provided to handle object replication. In this paper we discuss the issue of augmenting CORBA with group communication, which is considered an adequate paradigm to handle replication. We distinguish two main approaches: the integration approach and the service approach. We argue that the service approach is more appropriate to CORBA as it preserves the modularity of the architecture. We describe a proposal for a group communication service and discuss some implementation issues