Implementing the OMG trading object service—the TOI product

The offering and discovery of services in a globally distributed, open environment is supported by trading object services, implemented by specific trusted entities, called traders. Traders allow run-time bindings between clients and servers, support service providers in advertising their service offers, and help clients in selecting the best offers according to service properties and server qualities. Recently, the OMG has published a paper which specifies a trading object service for the OMG/CORBA environment. This specification is to become a component standard for open distributed processing in the future information society. We describe TOI — the first OMG Trading Object service Implementation, available for the ORBIX environment on Sun Solaris and Windows NT platforms. The implementation is based on a flexible, modular architecture which allows different traders, e.g. simple traders and linked traders, to be configured easily. The TOI trader is embedded in a trading community which includes additional components for policy administration and federation management.