Two CORBA services enabling TMO network programming

Abstract

In facilitating efficient construction of real time distributed computing applications composed of CORBA-compliant components, there are practical advantages in keeping the core component of the CORBA standards, i.e., ORB and interface definition language (IDL), unchanged or minimally changed. This means to bring new mechanisms and capabilities for real time computing support in the form of CORBA services. The paper discusses how this "minimal-extension" strategy can be realized. We focus on the design and implementation of a middleware providing execution support for the time-triggered message-triggered object (TMO) structured CORBA applications. The TMO structuring scheme is a syntactically simple and natural but semantically powerful extension of the conventional object structuring approaches. The strategy discussed is to provide the additional capabilities for executing and connecting TMO-structured CORBA-compliant components via two CORBA services: TMO Execution Support (TMOES) and Cooperating Network Configuration Management (CNCM). Both services can be implemented in the form of distributed computing middleware consisting of CORBA-compliant objects.