Adaptability in CORBA: The Mobile Proxy Approach

Abstract

Adaptability is one of the most important challenges in modern distributed systems. It may be defined as the ease with which a software application satisfies the different system constraints and the requirements of users and other applications. Adaptability is needed because distributed systems are inherently open, heterogeneous, and dynamic environments integrating a wide range of platforms, operating systems and applications from a number of different sources. In this paper, we propose to use mobile proxies to provide adaptability in distributed applications integrated using the CORBA technology. Downloading stubs and skeletons at runtime allows the adaptation of either client or server interfaces as well as the protocol linking the two.