From legacy RPC services to distributed objects

The remote procedure call (RPC) paradigm has successfully modeled several sophisticated client-server applications. It provides a simple and efficient way to develop distributed programs. The concept of RPC comes from procedure-based programming languages. As object-oriented technologies grow, the idea of invoking program entities on different address spaces also comes into object-oriented software development. Distributed object computing is the realization of this trend. This paper identifies the motivations, the issues and the design of translating RPC services into CORBA objects via reengineering processes. The conversion includes: converting RPC languages to CORBA IDL (Interface Definition Language), converting RPC server implementation source codes to CORBA server object implementation source code, and converting RPC clients' source codes to CORBA client object source code.