Web enabled TMN manager

Developing management solutions in the in the telecommunications industry is very important and is also becoming increasingly complex. The industry has used OSI based telecommunications management network (TMN) solutions which have been successful but have their difficulties. The steep learning curve and dearth of skilled developers means that it is becoming increasingly difficult to develop TMN applications. In the IT industry distributed object computing (DOC), in particular the Object Management Group (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), is gaining widespread popularity as a means of integrating many disparate and legacy systems into an integrated component based solution. In general it offers a simpler, more intuitive design and development path, and there are a rapidly increasing number of skilled developers emerging. We share our experiences in developing a CORBA based manager for a TMN based trouble ticketing agent. The development is driven by the manager requirements captured through use case analysis followed by object modelling and Java implementation. We document the steps involved, explain our methodology for creating a high level interface to the agent and explain the advantages of using such an approach.