An object group model and its implementation to support cooperative applications on CORBA

Cooperative applications are emerging as a promising new field for the use of distributed systems technology. This new type of application also presents new requirements, challenging research and development of distributed systems. One of these requirements refers to the group nature of the interactions in these new environments, which has not found suitable support with traditional distributed system mechanisms. In this paper we propose a model of object groups to support this kind of applications. An implementation model based on distributed objects is also proposed and a prototype constructed on top of a CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) platform is described.