CERC Technical Report Series

Technical Memoranda

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This effort was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA), under Grant No. MDA972-91-J-1022 for the DARPA Initiative in Concurrent

Engineering and by the National Library of Medicine under Contract No. N01-LM-3-3525.

Concurrent Engineering Research Center

West Virginia University

P. O. Box 6506, Morgantown WV 26506-6506

CERC-TR-TM-96-014

COLLABORATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES USING THE WWW AND

CORBA-BASED ENVIRONMENTS

V. Jagannathan

G. Almasi

Anca Suvaiala

July 1996

Proceedings of the IEEE Fifth Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collabo-

rative Enterprises, June 19-21, 1996, Stanford, California. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer

Society Press, 1996.

Collaborative Infrastructures Using the WWW and CORBA-based

Environments

V. Jagannathan*, G. Almasi, Anca Suvaiala Concurrent Engineering Research Center
West Virginia University, P.O. Box 6506, Morgantown, WV 26506-6506

Abstract

The current proliferation of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the growing popularity of the Java language[1] for programming such environments has fueled a need for Web browsers to provide access to the variety of information sources and services now available on the Internet. In parallel to this revolution, computer vendors have been cooperating to develop an interoperable standard for communication which is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). In this paper, we present the tools we have developed that provide powerful mechanisms for accessing any service based upon the interoperable CORBA standards from the popular WWW browsers. These tools are available in the public domain and have been downloaded and used around the world for building practical, fieldable systems.