Jon Siegel

XML gets mentioned a lot as an interoperability "platform." XML by itself can't be a platform, of course, because it's a document format. (It may be flexible, human-readable, dynamic, popular, and cool because it looks a lot like HTML, but it's still just a document format and there are many differences between that and an interoperability platform.) To interoperate using XML, you have to either build an infrastructure around it or incorporate it into an infrastructure that already exists. While other folks build yet another infrastructure around XML, I'll show in this article how XML has been incorporated into the mature, stable, secure, transactional, scalable, and robust CORBA infrastructure. Because the XML specification doesn't provide an API into the document structure, the W3C has supplemented XML with the Document Object Model (DOM). To make their API progra... (more)

CORBA's New Interoperable Naming Service

CORBA's new Interoperable Naming Service (INS) introduces three features that combine to help manage your computing environment and integrate it better with the Internet and your corporate intranet as well. These features: Define URL-like representations for the CORBA object reference, allowing your ORB to access publicly available CORBA-based services or an object that you know the name of at an available remote site that runs a CORBA 2.4 or later ORB (the CORBA equivalent of the Web's familiar format, www.omg.org). Let you configure your client ORB from any vendor in a standard... (more)

CORBA for Real-Time Systems

Real-Time (RT) systems are, in the temporal sense, predictable. They're not necessarily fast, though many are; they don't necessarily deal with high throughput, though many do. Their defining characteristic is their temporal predictability. They run glamorous, high-risk, high-speed applications such as fly-by-wire airplane and missile controls, military data collection and display, and manufacturing process control, but they also run more mundane applications such as e-commerce transaction systems and materials-handling facilities. For example, RT systems ensure that: When the h... (more)

Working with DTD-Based XML documents using CORBA's Static XML/Value Mapping

This article is condensed from Quick CORBA 3 by Jon Siegel, ©2001 by Object Management Group, and is used by permission. There's a lot of XML traveling over various networks, and the interesting case is when it travels from one company to another. To make this easier to deal with and more useful, industry bodies are standardizing XML document formats as DTDs - XML Document Type Definitions - each tailored to a specific purpose. When a company receives an XML document that conforms to a DTD, it knows what each element will be called and how the elements will be structured. (It d... (more)

Working With Dynamic XML Documents

XML gets mentioned a lot as an interoperability "platform." By itself, of course, XML can't be a platform because it's a document format. It may be flexible, human-readable, dynamic, popular, and cool because it looks a lot like HTML, but it's still just a document format, and there are a lot of differences between a document format and an interoperability platform. To interoperate using XML, you either have to build an infrastructure around it or incorporate it into an infrastructure that already exists. While other folks build yet another infrastructure around XML, we show in th... (more)