Using WAP as the enabling technology for CORBA in mobile and wireless environments

CORBA is currently the most popular middleware platform. Due to the progress and acceptance of mobile communications, it is inevitable to offer CORBA services for mobile terminals, especially over a wireless link. The Object Management Group, the standardization body for CORBA, already requested proposals for extending CORBA in the wireless environment, leading to several submissions. However, the standardization process is far from being completed. Therefore, we propose the adaptation of an outstanding approach to supply a range of services in the mobile environment, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) framework. In the paper, we show how the CORBA standard and the WAP framework can converge, leading to a comprehensive middleware platform for distributed applications in a wireless and mobile environment.