CORBA/CGI Bridge

The CORBA/CGI bridge is an evaluation prototype for testing how a CGI application can be replaced by CORBA components.

The idea behind this prototype was to replace a CGI application that accessed a server-side application with a CORBA layer. The client application had to remain unchanged, as its source code was not available.

In the first step, the CGI application was replaced by a Java servlet deployed on Sun’s Java Web Server. At this stage, the servlet still accessed the server application by executing a command-line script.

CORBA-CGI Architecture

In the second step, the server application was wrapped with a CORBA IDL interface and accessed from within the servlet via a Java CORBA client. The CORBA server was written in C++ using the VisiBroker CORBA ORB, while the servlet used Sun’s JavaIDL CORBA ORB on the client side.

The servlet exposes the same interface as the original CGI program. It simply parses the HTTP request parameters and forwards them to the CORBA server application’s interface. The benefit of using CORBA is that the server-side application can be moved to a different machine, with all network communication handled transparently by the CORBA IIOP protocol.