Bionic Buffalo Tech Note #20: Quick Start Guide to Writing CORBA Client Applications
(with very few exceptions) the same mechanisms to call an object operation, whether the target object
is local, remote, ordinary, pseudo, or otherwise classified. To keep things simple, in this Tech Note, no
distinction is made among the various categories of objects. They all are referred to simply, as
“objects”.
The main thing to keep in mind is there are certain things you cannot do with pseudo objects. For
example, you cannot pass a reference to the
ORB to another machine, because the ORB is considered
local, and an application on the other machine cannot necessarily invoke
ORB operations on your
machine. These forbidden things, while not always intuitively obvious, are not likely to get a beginner
into too much trouble anyway.
That being said, it is necessary for the purposes of this discussion to distinguish one kind of ordinary
object, which is the server object whose operations are to be invoked by the client application being
written. Note that “server object” is not a CORBA term of art; it is used here as a term of convenience.
A server object, as this Tech Note uses the term, is not necessarily on a separate server, and is not
necessarily even in a separate application.
Another term which will be used is “target object”, a term which is used in the CORBA specifications.
A target object is the object upon which a operation is invoked. When an application has selected a
specific server object and invokes an operation on that server object, then that server object also
becomes a target object.
Basic Steps
Creating a client application consists of the following basic steps:
1. Determine certain fundamental information about the server objects and how they are used.
2. Make some decisions about the application environment and implementation.
3. Compile the interface IDL to create the header files, stubs, and other necessary programs and data
structures.
4. Design and code the application.
5. Link the application with the necessary compiler output and support libraries.
6. Run the application.
The steps common to almost all programming (design review, testing, documentation, and so on) are
omitted from this list unless there are special considerations to be brought up for writing CORBA
client applications.
Determine Fundamental Information About Server Objects
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