Design and implementation of an enhanced CORBA property service

Part of the number of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) services specified by the Object Management Group is CORBA's Property Service (PS), which can be used to provide CORBA objects dynamically with additional properties not declared in their static Interface Description Language (IDL) type definitions. Although the management of dynamic properties is a common requirement for several application purposes, the support offered by CORBA's PS is very limited. One shortcoming, for example, is the fact that the PS specification considers the association between objects and properties an implementation detail, which is completely delegated to the developers of applications that require property management. Moreover, CORBA's PS does not support the definition of properties with lifetime restrictions, i.e. it is not possible to specify properties that are only allowed to exist for a certain period of time. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by proposing an extended version of CORBA's PS, which provides explicit property set/object associations managed by the service and integrates the aspect of temporary properties. A primary goal in our design of the Enhanced PS was smoothness of the extensions with respect to downward compatibility with the original specification. In addition, we intended to simplify the integration of the new functionality in CORBA applications that need to utilize the enhanced features. We provide a detailed description of the design of our Enhanced PS by explaining IDL code fragments and offering Unified Modeling Language diagrams. In addition, some implementation aspects concerning our Java‐based prototype of the new service are discussed and the results of several benchmarking runs are presented. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.