Constructing reliable distributed communication systems with CORBA

Communication software and distributed services for next-generation applications must be reliable, efficient, flexible, and reusable. These requirements motivate the use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). However, building highly available applications with CORBA is hard. Neither the CORBA standard nor conventional implementations of CORBA directly address complex problems related to distributed computing, such as real-time or high-speed quality of service, partial failures, group communication, and causal ordering of events. This article describes a CORBA-based framework that uses the virtual synchrony model to support reliable data- and process-oriented distributed systems that communicate through synchronous methods and asynchronous messaging.