CORBA 2.6.1 Programmer's Guide for Java

Chapter 3. Compiling and Building an Application

Overview of NonStop CORBA Application Development

Development Begins with IDL and CORBA Objects

Development Process

Tips for Building NonStop CORBA Application Components

Makefiles

Special Considerations for Building Transactional Clients and Servers

Using the IDL Compiler

IDL Compiler Processing

IDL Compiler Syntax

Overview of NonStop CORBA Application Development

This section provides an overview of the steps used in developing a simple client and a server. When developing a more complex application

environment, you can use these same steps for the individual components. What changes is the number of objects and the complexity of the

interactions between the clients and the objects.

Although application development is often described as though one developer controls all the application components, object technology lets you

develop discrete components without knowing the details of other components with which they interact.

Development Begins with IDL and CORBA Objects

IDL is the language used to specify CORBA object interfaces that client objects can call and object implementations can supply. Specifying an

interface in IDL allows clients and servers to run on distributed systems using different operating systems and written in different languages.

CORBA objects are entities that the ORB can locate and that can receive client requests. CORBA objects are not concrete until they have

been implemented in a programming language such as C++ or Java. CORBA objects are targets for client invocations.

You use the NonStop CORBA IDL compiler to generate the stubs and skeletons used to build a NonStop CORBA application. NonStop CORBA

applications must be built using these stubs and skeletons. Code generated by other IDL compilers will lack the appropriate vendor-specific

code.

IDL interfaces can be compiled to generate Java client stubs and server skeletons. The mapping from IDL to Java is defined in the IDL/Java

Language Mapping section of the CORBA Specification. For exceptions, see the NonStop CORBA 2.6.1 Programmer's Reference.

Development Process

Let's start with an example of object interface specification, and follow the process of developing a client and a server. The required steps are

described below and illustrated in the

Figure 3–1.

Figure 3.1. The Process of Developing a Client and a Server