Building distributed enterprise OLTP applications: current CORBA limitations

Online transaction processing (OLTP) applications have special requirements in the areas of scalability and performance. Mincom currently markets a successful product, MIMS (Mincom Information Management System), which is a large, integrated OLTP system consisting of about 16,000 KLOC (kilo-lines of code), mostly COBOL. Our research group is developing prototypes in preparation for migrating MIMS into a distributed architecture. CORBA is our current research focus. This paper examines the limitations of CORBA for current use in enterprise OLTP development. Major concerns include: the lack of a standardised persistence interface for use with major database vendors; the immaturity of the Object Transaction Service and Concurrency Service; the lack of integrated workflow solutions; scalability and robustness; the lack of performance monitoring tools; and poor enterprise development environments. We are optimistic that vendors and the OMG will eventually solve these problems, but feel that it may be a few years before workable commercial solutions are in place.