Data-intensive Intra- and Internet Applications based on Java, CORBA, and the World Wide Web

Intra/Internet technology has become a key issue in the development of modern systems. Nowadays it is no longer sufficient to present static information pages through the WWW, instead we need interactive applications that may even compute complex results or process large data sets. In this paper, we describe a prototype based on Java and CORBA. Both represent modern concepts that have been developed to fulfill these requirements. Their combination results in the kind of data processing we want to apply to the WWW: First, portable, powerful, modular and even reusable client programs instead of cryptic HTML scripts, second, well-defined interfaces, and, third, efficient server processes separated from the WWW server and its CGI extensions. Communication is controlled by a fault tolerant CORBA layer, which also enables server development using a different language than Java. In this paper, we focus on data-intensive applications, like, e.g., typical database applications and information systems, that are designed to run in Intra/Internet environments. Besides a discussion of CORBA and its data shipping capabilities, we take a closer look at Java and its runtime behavior. Finally, we report on the experiences gathered with our prototype system and its testbed application. Results measured within the last two years show that technology has already moved in the right direction, but performance is still a critical issue. The system described in this paper has also been used to gather experiences with and to influence the new language binding of the Standard Data Access Interface (SDAI) of the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP, ISO 10303) to Java. SDAI technology is extensively used in engineering applications and together with CORBA and WWW technology it provides the primitives to build on-line information systems, like catalogues or diagnostic systems. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.