Data access and transportation services for the CORBA environment

CORBA is an ideal environment in which to build component applications. However, the number of services available to support these component applications are lacking in certain areas of CORBA. This paper presents an overview of two services based in the CORBA environment. The Data Object Service provides a generic framework of interfaces to provide access to data in various heterogeneous data stores. The paper also discusses the similarities and differences between data object service and the OMG Persistent Object Service. The other service is the Stream Tunnel service. The Stream Tunnel Service allows distributed streams to be set-up. CORBA objects implementing the streamable interface of the OMG CosExternalization Service can be pushed and pulled through these streams. The streams can be implemented using different network data transport mechanisms. The paper describes an investigation into two data transport mechanisms-ORB based and socket based