Trader Down Under: Upside Down and Inside Out

In this article we present a new object-oriented design of a trader customized to the CORBA environment as a CORBA Service. Key design decisions include the separation of trader, service types, and service offers, the reuse of OMG's CORBA services, and the application of a fine-grain object model. Emphasis is also placed on the federation of traders by specifying interfaces for this purpose and a federation protocol. The fine-grain object model allows a wide range of implementations and configurations to satisfy different user requirements. This design is an object-oriented alternative to the trader specification to be adopted by the OMG.