Active COM: an inter-working framework for CORBA and DCOM

Abstract

DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) are two major solutions to develop distributed applications. Each of them uses its own functionality, for instance the communication protocols: ORPC (Object Remote Procedure Call) in the case of DCOM and IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) for CORBA. That is why a DCOM client cannot co-operate with a CORBA server without a gateway. We propose an alternative approach to allow generic inter-working between these environments without gateways. Actually, we present a model called "Active COM", which provides native inter-working between CORBA and DCOM.