1.5.1 About Factory-based Routing

Factory-based routing enables you to a specify what server group is associated with an object reference. As a result, you can define the group and machine in which a given object is instantiated and then distribute the processing load for a given application across multiple machines.

With factory-based routing, routing is performed when a factory creates an object reference. The factory specifies field information in its call to the Oracle CORBA TP Framework to create an object reference. The TP Framework executes the routing algorithm based on the routing criteria that is defined in the ROUTING section of an application’s UBBCONFIG file. The resulting object reference has, as its target, an appropriate server group for the handling of method invocations on the object reference. Any server that implements the interface in that server group is eligible to activate the servant for the object reference.

Thus, the activation of CORBA objects can be distributed by server group based on the defined criteria and different implementations of CORBA interfaces can be supplied in different groups. So you can replicate the same CORBA interface across multiple server groups, based on defined, group-specific differences.

The primary benefit of factory-based routing is that it provides a simple means to scale an application, and invocations on a given interface in particular, across a growing deployment environment. Distributing the deployment of an application across additional machines is strictly an administrative function that does not require you to recode or rebuild the application.