The best of three worlds — Building a distributed application as a step toward business objects

Integrating the best of three worlds — the market leading Microsoft^∗ front end, the emerging industry standard for client/server (C/S) middleware, and a seamless implementation of persistency for complex data — is a great challenge. The intent of this integration not only is to introduce new technologies but also to take a step toward business objects. This paper presents a practical implementation of such an integration instead of discussing merely its theoretical models and advantages. The implementation, which is based on the Component Object Model (COM) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), shows the implications of the architecture and the challenges for the future. The paper discusses the experience gained in applying the technologies, and it demonstrates the architecture's feasibility.