Extending Corba for Multi-Domain Management

The Corba architecture will be of significant importance in the future for building distributed systems. Nevertheless there are other systems that exist for the purpose of distributed computing such as COM, TINA, ANSA and for the purpose of management such as OSI network management standard and SNMP. The goal of this paper is to show that the Corba architecture can be enhanced to allow transparent access to other systems. The approach chosen is based on a generic object model that encapsulates Corba's Dynamic Invocation Interface with a high-level and more abstract (and easier-to-use) API. Another component is the concept of adapters that take care of bridging requests between object models; their main use is the conversion of requests from one system to another. Their functionality can be compared to Corba's object adapters, however, contrary to those, they are located on the client rather than the server side. The third component is the extended interface repository (EIR). It is essentially Corba's interface repository (IR) enhanced to accomodate not only meta information about Corba interfaces, but about other models as well. The intention is to make the IR a distributed meta-information service for all object models.