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Home > GNAT Pro > Add-on Technologies > Middleware and CORBA

Middleware implementation with an innovative architecture supporting multiple collaborating personalities

PolyORB is an architecture that provides distribution services through standard programming interfaces (e.g. CORBA, the Ada Distributed Systems Annex, or the MOMA messaging API) and communication protocols (e.g. GIOP and SOAP). It addresses distribution model interoperability issues by allowing a single middleware instance to execute different personalities simultaneously. It also takes advantage of modularity and code reuse to allow middleware configuration and deployment in real-time, high-integrity applications.

The recent release of PolyORB 2.0 brings increased versatility to our generic middleware technology.

A number of different middleware solutions exist for creating object-oriented distributed applications. Each defines two aspects:

• The interface seen by the developer’s application objects
• The protocol used by the middleware environment to talk to other nodes in the distributed application.

Usually, middleware for a given platform supports only one set of such interfaces, and cannot interoperate with other platforms. PolyORB solves this problem in two ways. First, it is “polymorphic”, allowing several different implementations of each of these aspects to be used within the same middleware framework. Second, PolyORB allows such different personalities to coexist in the same instance of the running middleware. It decouples the personality presented to applications on one side (”application personality”), and the personality presented to other middleware products on the other side (”protocol personality”). Multiple implementations of each personalisable aspect can coexist within the same instance of the running middleware: unlike previous generic middleware, PolyORB is actually “schizophrenic”.

The decoupling of application and protocol personalities, and the support for multiple simultaneous personalities within the same running middleware are key features required for the construction of interoperable distributed applications. This allows PolyORB to communicate with middleware products that implement different distribution standards: PolyORB provides middleware-to-middleware interoperability.

PolyORB’s modularity lets you extend or modify its core components and personalities to meet specific requirements. Thus you can create standards-compliant or specific personalities ranging from early stage prototyping to full-featured implementation. The PolyORB architecture also lets you automatically create “just-in-time” proxies between incompatible environments.

Platforms

For the most up-to-date information on available platforms please contact us at: sales@adacore.com