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COOTS 2001 Abstract
TORBA: Trading Contracts for CORBA
Raphaël Marvie, Philippe Merle, Jean-Marc Geib, Sylvain Leblanc
Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille
Abstract
Trading is a key function in the context of distributed applications:
It allows runtime discovering of available resources. In order to
standardize this function, the Open Distributed Processing (ODP) and
Object Management Group (OMG) have specified a trading service for
CORBA objects: The CosTrading. This specification has two main
drawbacks: First, this service is complex to use from applications and
second, it does not offer type checking of trading requests at compilation
time. Both are discussed in this paper. The main goal of our
Trader Oriented Request Broker Architecture (TORBA) is to
provide a trading framework and its associated tools, which tend to
offer typed trading operations that are simple to use from
applications and checked at compilation time. In that, we define the
concept of Trading Contracts, written with the TORBA
Definition Language (TDL). Such contracts are then compiled to generate
trading proxies offering simple-to-use interfaces. These interfaces
completely hide the complexity of the ODP/OMG CosTrading APIs. In the
meantime, TDL contracts could be dynamically used through a generic
graphical console exploiting a contract repository. The example used
in this paper, clearly states the advantages brought by the TDL
trading contracts: type checking at compilation time, simple to
use, and providing a powerful framework for CORBA object trading.
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