Object Wrapping (for WWW) - The key to Integrated Services

In the world of information services heterogeneity is inevitable: not only because of the huge amount of legacy data which exists on a wide variety of different platforms in different formats; but also because there is unlikely ever to be a format, protocol or platform which is suitable for all applications.

This paper explores how heterogeneity is managed within WWW and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) [OMG 93]. It shows how the concept of object wrapping is useful for incorporating external information services and providing an integrated view of that information. In doing this work we are developing a programming model for WWW which is very close to CORBA. We conclude with some recommendations about the kind of facilities middleware needs to incorporate to support easy integration of information services.

We begin by comparing the CORBA and WWW models, and go on to show how object wrapping can be applied to both.

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Contents

• Introduction
• Comparing CORBA and WWW
• Integrating third party information services
• A stub Compiler for CGI
• A stub Compiler for HTTP
• An application scenario
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgements
• References