Process Algebraic Specification of the New Asynchronous CORBA Messaging Service

CORBA (The Common Object Request Broker Architecture) has to continually evolve in order to cope with the changes of requirement of applications which become larger and more distributed. For this reason new features are being added to the CORBA specification, for instance the last proposal for a revised CORBA Messaging Service includes two new asynchronous models of request invocation. Since these new features will be added in the next CORBA implementations a relevant issue is to study their operational behaviour from different perspectives in order to facilitate the task of implementors. This paper addresses this issue providing an analysis of the CORBA Messaging Service which includes the new asynchronous features. In particular we illustrate how CORBA models for request invocation can be mapped into a message passing architecture based on the actor model. For this purpose we exploit an algebra of actors which supports some of the main features of the abstract Object Model of the Object Management Group, such as object identity and an explicit notion of state. This approach allows us to discuss and compare different models of request invocation in a standard process algebraic perspective for instance we show how different notions of equivalence, such as standard and asynchronous bisimulation, can be adapted to reason about CORBA.

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