Implementing high availability CORBA applications with Java

The integration of Java and CORBA has opened the way for a wide variety of Internet applications. However, such applications will frequently come across communication and node failures which can affect both their performance and consistency. Therefore, there is a need for techniques which will allow applications to tolerate such failures and continue to provide expected services. A common technique is through the use of atomic transactions, which ensure that only consistent state changes take place despite concurrent access and failures. However, they may be insufficient to guarantee forward progress. This can be accomplished by replicating resources, so that the failure of a subset of replicas can be masked from users. The paper describes a toolkit that integrates transactions and replication by making use of standard CORBA services.