Building Reliable Distributed Systems with CORBA

New classes of large-scale distributed applications will have to deal with unpredictable communication delays, with partial failures, and with networks that partition. In addition, sophisticated applications such as teleconferencing, video-on-demand, and concurrent software engineering require a group communication abstraction. These paradigms are not adequately addressed by CORBA. CORBA mainly deals with point-to-point communication and offers no support for the development of reliable applications that exhibit predictable behavior in distributed systems. In this article, we present extensions to CORBA which provide group communication, reliability, and fault tolerance. We also describe Orbix+Isis and Electra—two CORBA object request brokers that support the implementation of reliable distributed applications and groupware. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.