COM2CORBA

An evaluation prototype for testing CORBA access from VisualBasic applications.

The goal of this prototype was to evaluate whether a commercially available COM2CORBA bridge is suitable for accessing CORBA objects from a Microsoft COM application.

The prototype was developed using an evaluation version of Orbix 2.3 for Windows NT and Sun Solaris, along with the IONA Orbix COMet COM2CORBA bridge.

COM2CORBA prototype architecture

The server component runs on Solaris 5 and provides access to a Fulcrum Search Server, an SGML indexing engine. The client is a VisualBasic search application running on Windows NT.

A search term is transparently mapped from COM into a CORBA request by the COM2CORBA bridge and sent via IIOP to the CORBA server component. The server performs a keyword search against the Fulcrum Search Server and returns the result list to the VisualBasic client, which displays the search results to the user.

This prototype demonstrates how smoothly CORBA objects can be accessed through COM interfaces.