Distributing CORBA views from an OODBMS

The need to distribute objects on the Internet and to offer views from databases has found a solution with the advent of CORBA. Most database management systems now offer CORBA interfaces which are generally simple mapping of the database schema to the CORBA world. This approach does not address all the problems of database interoperation because (i) such a view is static (ii) its semantic is completely bound to the semantic of the schema and it is not possible to re-model it (iii) only one view per database can be offered (iv) access may be limited to reading and no mechanism is given to write in the database through the view. To solve these problems, we have designed a language, the Interface Mapping Definition Language (IMDL) and some tools, grouped in the Interface Mapping Service (IMS). IMDL is used to define CORBA views from OODBMS, while IMS generates an IDL construct and a full CORBA implementation from an IMDL construct and a database schema.