Orbacus .NET Connector
The Orbacus .NET Connector is a custom .NET remoting channel, referred to as Orbacus.Remoting, from IONA Technologies. Its purpose is to support application integration across network boundaries, different operating systems, and different programming languages. Specifically, it provides a high performance bridge that enables integration between .NET clients and CORBA objects. It allows you to develop and deploy .NET client applications that can interact with existing CORBA server applications that might be running on Windows or another platform.
The .NET Connector provides many advantages to the .NET programmer. For example:
- It provides enterprise CORBA scalability to the .NET environment.
- It facilitates development and deployment of .NET client applications that can call CORBA servers, with no presumption of CORBA knowledge on the .NET programmers' part, and with no need for modifications to the CORBA server-side implementation.
- It enables dynamic runtime mapping between CORBA and .NET types (in this case, via supplied utilties that generate required .NET metadata from the OMG IDL defined for the target CORBA objects).
- Allows VB, C# and ASP.NET to invoke operations on CORBA servers resulting in a more .NET-centric service architecture.
The figure below shows a conceptual overview of how the .NET Connector facilitates integration of .NET clients and CORBA servers.
Advantages for the .NET Programmer
The .NET Connector provides two main advantages to .NET programmers:
- The .NET Connector provides access to existing CORBA servers, which can be implemented on any operating system and in any language supported by a CORBA implementation. IONA's CORBA products support a range of operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris and OS/390. It also supports different programming languages, including C++ and Java.
- Using the .NET Connector, a .NET programmer can use familiar .NET-based tools to build heterogeneous systems that use both .NET and CORBA components within a .NET environment. The .NET Connector, therefore, presents a programming model that is familiar to the .NET programmer.
Compatibility
The Orbacus .NET Connector is built on top of Orbacus C++ but it is fully interoperable with any deployed CORBA server from any CORBA vendor. This means that the .NET Connector can invoke operations on a server built using Orbix, Orbacus, or even a non-IONA ORB such as TAO and VisiBroker.
License
The Orbacus .NET Connector, like all Orbacus products, is free for evaluation and academic purposes. It relies on the Orbacus C++ product however, so commercial or government deployments require a runtime license for Orbacus C++. The .NET Connector requires no additional purchases however so current Orbacus customers with valid Orbacus C++ runtime licenses can immediately use and deploy it.
