The Internet meets distributed computing

Provison of services in the Internet is still not straightforward. Despite the advantages on offer to the service provider, standards such as CORBA are not adopted because they require the service user to install a distributed systems infrastructure. The present user-led market requires different solutions.

ANSA projects in this area aim to bring traditional distributed systems infrastructures and services closer towards the Web and its attractive user interface without requiring significant investments in new technology at least from the end user.

(dead hyperlink - http://www.ansa.co.uk/ANSA/ISF/overview.html), which was delivered in December 1995, provided a set of components from which gateways between HTTP and IIOP could be built. A locator and a stub compiler completed the package. It provides the components needed to access CORBA services from the Web.

Two other ways to distribute and provide CORBA services to Web users are in work:

1. The Jade project delivers a machine independent CORBA 2.0 IIOP communications engine written in the Java programming language. This means that CORBA clients can be effortlessly downloaded via the Web and automatically installed into users' Web browsers. Jade gives service providers the means to build, and distribute via the Web, user-interfaces to their on-line CORBA services.
2. The Quartz project employs standard e-mail to distribute access to services and implements wide area workflow support.

The size and complexity of web servers is becoming a risk in many organisations. The Topaz project proposes to structure the web server using standard CORBA technology.