Using Object Technology to Integrate Distributed Applications

Object technology as a general approach has been shown to be a valuable tool for modeling real systems, and can be applied to a wide-ranging set of problems. Recently the application of object technology to distributed systems design, in particular application integration, has been of intense interest to solve a number of problems: application interoperability, multi-vendor environments, multi-language implementation and heterogeneous hardware, operating systems and networking. The Object Management Group (OMG) is developing a suite of standards addressing the distributed application integration problem using object technology and a novel approach of selecting commercially available software. The first standards to emerge have addressed both a specific pervasive model of object-oriented systems (an Object Model) and a portable, interoperable interface for application messaging (an Object Request Broker).