Design and Implementation

of the

Portable Object Adapter

Frank Pilhofer

For the impatient: click here

Infos

About the document

This document was submitted on Jun 18, 1999 as my diploma thesis. The work was hosted by the department for distributed systems and operating systems (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme) by Prof. Dr. Geihs, at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

About the thesis

The thesis in general deals with CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture. More specifically, it takes a look at the server-side, where object adapters exist to aid the developer in implementing objects and in dealing with request processing.

The new Portable Object Adapter was recently added to the CORBA 2.2 standard. My task was the implementation of the POA in MICO and the examination if (a) the POA specification is sensible and (b) in which areas it improves over the old Basic Object Adapter.

After introducing distributed platforms in general and CORBA in particular, the thesis' main two chapters are a detailed abstract examination ("Design") of the POA design and their relization ("Implementation"), highlighting the potential trouble spots, persistence and collocation.

Audience

This is not a tutorial of POA programming. While no CORBA background is required to read the thesis -- it starts at "ground zero" -- it may be more interesting to readers with some knowledge about CORBA programming. For example, if you've only done client-side CORBA programming so far, if you're still using the BOA, or are still unsure of the POA's full capabilities.

The Reference Implementation chapter might also be interesting if you want to learn about MICO internals.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all who helped me with their ideas, comments and corrections: (in alphabetical order) Christian Becker, Prof. Dr. K. Geihs, Michi Henning, Rudolf Janz, Arno Puder, Kay Römer and Prof. Dr. R. Switzer. Of course, all final errors and inconsistencies are mine.

Also kudos to the members of the mico-devel mailing list for their usage of the POA, their bug reports and fixes.

Comments

Don't hesitate to send comments. If I receive any, I might put up a comments page to display them.

Copyright

The thesis is mine. Feel free to make copies for private use. Please contact me for other kinds of reproduction. I'm very pleased if any of its texts, graphics or concepts might be of use elsewhere and will not oppose any use, I just want to be aware of it.

Software

The software developed for the thesis, the implementation of the Portable Object Adapter, has been contributed to the MICO distribution.

Documents

• Browse the thesis online.
• The thesis (817k) in PostScript format.
• The bibliography with links to cited online documents.