Overview of the BEA Tuxedo CORBA Environment

 

This topic includes the following sections:

• Introduction to the BEA Tuxedo CORBA Environment

• Features of the BEA Tuxedo CORBA Environment

 

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Introduction to the BEA Tuxedo CORBA Environment

The CORBA environment in the BEA Tuxedo product is based on the CORBA standard as a programming model for developing enterprise applications with high performance, scalability, and reliability. BEA Tuxedo CORBA extends the Object Request Broker (ORB) model with online transaction processing (OLTP) functions. The BEA Tuxedo CORBA deployment infrastructure delivers secure, transactional, distributed applications in a managed environment.

CORBA objects built with the BEA Tuxedo product are accessible from Web-based applications that communicate using the CORBA Object Management Group (OMG) Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). IIOP is the standard protocol for communications running on the Internet or on an intranet within an enterprise.

BEA Tuxedo CORBA has a native implementation of IIOP, ensuring high-performance, interoperable, distributed-object applications for the Internet, intranets, and enterprise computing environments. You can build integrated enterprise applications using multiple programming models. CORBA and Application-to- Transaction-Monitor-Interface (ATMI) applications can be developed with fully integrated transaction management, security, administration, and reliability capabilities.

The interoperability technology incorporated into BEA Tuxedo CORBA provides for scalable connectivity between the CORBA and WebLogic Server environments. For information on interoperability see BEA Tuxedo Interoperability in the BEA Tuxedo online documentation.

Figure 1-1 illustrates the BEA Tuxedo CORBA environment.

Figure 1-1 BEA Tuxedo CORBA

 
 
 

The following sections outline the features of the CORBA environment.

 

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Features of the BEA Tuxedo CORBA Environment

The CORBA environment in the BEA Tuxedo product provides the following set of features:

• A C++ server-side ORB

• Client application options including:

  • CORBA Java client

  • ActiveX client

  • CORBA C++ client

  • Third-party client ORBs

• A proven run-time infrastructure for hosting e-commerce transaction applications, including client connection concentrators, high-performance message routing and load balancing, and high-availability features.

• A Transaction Processing (TP) Framework for object state and transaction management in CORBA applications.

• A Management Information Base (MIB) that defines the key management attributes of CORBA applications. In addition, programming interfaces and scripting capabilities are available to access the MIBs.

• An Administration Console graphical user interface (GUI) for the management of CORBA applications.

• The CORBA Transaction Service (OTS) to ensure the integrity of your data even when transactions span multiple programming models, databases, and applications.

• A security service that handles authentication for principals that need to access resources in a CORBA object in the CORBA environment.

• The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to encrypt client to server communication on the wire. SSL support includes IIOP connection pools.

• A Security Service Plug-In Interface (SPI) for CORBA that allows integration of third-party security plug-ins.

• A Notification Service that receives event posting messages, filters them, and distributes the messages to subscribers. The Notification Service provides two sets of interfaces: a CORBA-based interface and a simplified BEA-proprietary interface.

• An implementation of the CosLifeCycle service.

• An implementation of CosNaming that allows BEA Tuxedo CORBA server applications to advertise object references using logical names.

• An interface repository that stores meta information about BEA Tuxedo CORBA objects. Meta information includes information about modules, interfaces, operations, attributes, and exceptions.

• Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII) support. DII allows BEA Tuxedo CORBA client applications to create requests dynamically for objects that were not defined at compile time.

The remainder of this manual describes the programming environment for BEA Tuxedo CORBA and the development process for CORBA applications.