An Investigation Into the Mechanisms That Allow CORBA to Preserve Strong Typing

Lievens, David (2000) An Investigation Into the Mechanisms That Allow CORBA to Preserve Strong Typing. MSc(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a middleware specification. It aims at transparently extending programming languages to enable access to objects that are situated in different address spaces. Extending strongly typed languages raises the question whether the extension happens in a type-safe way. Claims are commonly made in the popular literature that this is indeed the case. However, this is not immediately clear from the specification. This thesis is an investigation into the different mechanisms that CORBA specifies to support remote operation invocations and a discussion of whether these mechanisms preserve type-safety for cross-boundary operation invocations. Successively, the object model, the type system, the architecture and the development process are reviewed. This is followed by a detailed investigation into the communications protocol used by CORBA, the server-side request dispatching mechanism and client-side operation invocation mechanisms. Conclusions drawn from these investigations are used to discuss type equivalence and the issues around interface evolution.

• Item Type: Thesis (MSc(R))
• Qualification Level: Masters
• Additional Information: Adviser: Richard Conor
• Keywords: Computer science
• Date of Award: 2000
• Depositing User: Enlighten Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2000-76087
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 19 Nov 2019 16:51
• Last Modified: 19 Nov 2019 16:51
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/76087