Reusing MS-Windows software applications under CORBA environment

CORBA is becoming the most important middleware that supports object oriented and client/server paradigm in distributed computing systems. However the application systems based on CORBA are still scarce to date. One main reason is that only few CORBA object services have been developed. Without added help mechanisms, to have a new CORBA application, a programmer should make efforts to design a program with a CORBA interface from scratch. In our previous work (K. Liang et al., 1997), a reengineering approach was proposed to convert RPC based programs to CORBA objects, which successfully speeded up the development of CORBA applications. However the source code is required in this approach. In many cases, software designers may not be able to get hold of the source code, so it is necessary to adapt existing PC software applications, particularly for Windows applications, in binary code mode to the object services under CORBA. Our study addresses this problem. A graphic factory temperature monitor system, which integrates MS-Excel under MS-Windows has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.