CORBA Communication : SUN

A Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) object can be invoked from a Web browser using CGI scripts or applets. The CGI solution is slow and inconvenient for two reasons:

1. A new process is forked for every request.
2. CGI scripts are stateless, and this is a problem if you want to develop, for example, a CORBA-based online shopping system.

In order for an applet to invoke a CORBA object, the browser must have an ORB or it must be compatible with Java 2, Standard Edition v1.3, otherwise the applet will not run. Also, for security reasons, applets can only communicate back to the host they were downloaded from, and therefore if the CORBA object is located on another server then the applet solution will not work.

This article gives a brief overview of CORBA, then discusses servlets and demonstrates how servlets can communicate with CORBA servers. The example in this article use JavaIDL and Tomcat. If you want to see how a CORBA client can be implemented as a stand-alone application or as an applet, see Getting Started with JavaIDL.