A CORBA adapter to promote reusability of Java components

As information technologies evolve, computing environments become more heterogeneous and distributed. More and more applications in different programming languages running on different platforms with different operating systems are required to communicate with each other over different computer networks. Conflicts resulting from having heterogeneous and distributed computing environments require strategies for interoperability. The emerging middleware technologies offer an industrial de facto standard communication infrastructure to support the interoperability of heterogeneous applications in components. However, the implementation of a component suffers from high interaction complexities in the component that seriously degrades the application independence. Software components should be built to be independent of the context in which they are used, allowing them to be reused in many different computing environments. In this paper, we are presenting an adapter to support the development of reusable CORBA components in Java. The adapter isolates, encapsulates, and manages a CORBA component's interactions outside the component. The use of adapters increases the reusability of CORBA components in Java and also simplifies the integration of the components to an application.