Common Object Request Broker Architecture: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:31, 23 August 2003

Revision as of 15:33, 23 August 2003

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In a general sense CORBA "wraps" code written in another language into a bundle containing additional information on the capabilities of the code inside, and how to call it. The resulting wrapped objects can then be called from other programs (or CORBA objects) over the network. In this sense CORBA can be considered as a machine-readable documentation format, similar to a [[header file]] but with considerably more information.

CORBA uses an [[Interface Definitiondefinition Languagelanguage]], to specify the interfaces that objects will present to the world. CORBA then specifies a "mapping" from IDL to a specific implementation language like [[C plus plus|C++]] or [[Java programming language|Java]]. This mapping precisely describes how the CORBA data types are to be used in both client and server implementations. Standard mappings exist for [[C language|C]], C++, [[Smalltalk|Smalltalk]], Java and [[Python programming language|Python]]. There are also non-standard mappings for [[Perl]] and [[Tcl]] implemented by ORBs written for those languages.

The CORBA IDL is only one example of an IDL.