Web Services: A Bridge between CORBA and DCOM

Abstract

In today s market, there are many distributed systems technologies and each technology has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each technology may work better than the others under some circumstances and it will work worse than the other technologies under other circumstances. Hence most of these technologies will survive, and new mechanisms should take place to allow the different technologies to work together. This paper provides a comprehensive comparison between the three most common distributed systems technologies CORBA, DCOM, and Web Services; it introduces the CORBA/DCOM interoperability problem, explains the OMG s specification to solve the problem, and outlines the existing methods for bridging CORBA and DCOM and their abilities and limitations. It explains why and how Web Services can be used to solve the CORBA/DCOM interoperability problem and demonstrates that by implementing a simple CORBA/DCOM bridge using the Web Services techniques SOAP, WDSL and UDDI.