Position Paper Title: CORBA and WWW: Merging Infrastructures
Presenter: Dr. Bruce H. Cottman, I-Kinetics, bhc@I-Kinetics.com, 617-270-1322


I will report on specific ComponentWare Consortium joint venture
efforts on deploying advanced information systems based on the synergy
of combining CORBA and WWW infrastructures. This work is being
conducted in a partnership consisting of BBN, I-Kinetics, IONA and
Stratus.  Time permitting I will also review how the CWC expects to
work within the scope of the OMG and W3C charters and the current
progress to-date to build a very large Virtual Enterprise Testbed
based on CORBA and the WWW.

A viable distributed object infrastructure is starting to emerge
industry-wide. The basis of this infrastructure is a critical mass of
the leading platform vendors adopting an object-based distributed
computing framework, initially CORBA. Significant reductions in
time-to-development, cost of system testing and requirements
validation will drive the initial market demand for reusable,
verifiable software components.

The value proposition is in enabling legacy applications to evolve
from an environment that requires code-intensive integration to one in
which the legacy functionality can be composed with other functions.
This can be accomplished using CORBA as framework for component
software and the WWW as the pervasive medium for assembling components
into end-user applications.

I will discuss two significant advanced capabilities, each one an
enabling capability for either CORBA or the WWW infrastructures:

(1)Legacy infrastructure integration 
(2) High Availability and Security

Our overall approach can be summarized in terms of two key
innovations: (1) run-time (dynamic) or compile-time (static)
composition and synthesis of reusable software components from legacy
applications (2) the ability to harden the resulting components as
required from a range of continuous-availability and security
protocols. Object group topologies will enable the deployment of
fault-tolerant services based on object replication and migration
management.  Critical operations will have uninterrupted access to
services in the event of discrete hardware and software failures. The
long-range goal of this proposed work is to overcome barriers to
building and deploying secure fault-tolerant systems from verified,
reusable software components that have been derived from legacy
applications. Our approach is based on the Common Object Request
Broker Architecture (CORBA), the emerging industry standard for
distributed object computing.  The basis of our innovation is to
combine CORBA services, security, group-based computing, and semantic
interface mapping to create high-end components from new legacy
applications. The resultant components are distributed objects whose
behavior has been customized for desired characteristics and quality
service levels as modified by the high-availability and security
options configured into the adapter. These components will reside
simultaneously in CORBA and WWW-space, where they can be assembled on
demand into ephemeral applications.