Introduction

In recent years, Java becomes one of the popular languages, almost takes over the whole market of middle-tier services and becomes one of the major development tools. However, programs written in Java are not easily optimized to meet the requirements for high performance demands. Java virtual machine (VM) always consumes most of the CPU resources for internal use. The poor performance of Java always pushes the developers to upgrade their production platform with the expansive hardware. (You may find that the commercial vendors propose to uses highly expensive computers for running Java middle-tier services (EJB), i.e. more than 8 CPUs and 10GB RAM for ordinary J2EE Performance Tests) It is commonly found that Java program runs on a full power machine, just give out the marginal performance, it is why I start out this project to provide a suitable development tools for high performance demand. Since Microsoft strategy push the MS native programs to run faster than those built from Java, Microsoft J++ is one of the fastest Java VM in the world. However, it is not popular and is not upgradable to provide Java 1.2 features. After a long time of research, Microsoft pushed out .Net on the market and believes that .Net is more competitive than Java in middle-tier services. Although there is no runtime engine for Unix platform, Mono, an open-source project, is being developed by free-lance programmers to provide a cross-platform engine for .Net applications. I expect Microsoft will release one for Unix platform in future.

TomORB is the first product released by CorbaTech based on .Net platform. The major target of this project is to provide a stable and speedy multiple-tier environment. We choose Corba Component Model (CCM) for our ultimate objective. CCM is platform independent and is generally accepted by the Corba community. Since the development time is limited for a programmer to create such a huge project like this, I decided to port the source codes from JacORB, JGroup, and OpenORB into .Net platform to shorten the development time.

 
TomORB v1.0 provides the following CORBA features:
  1. Corba 2.3 (with limited support for Fixed data type)
  2. Portable Object Adapter (POA)
  3. Valuetype (OBV)
  4. Transaction Service
  5. Implementation Repository (IMR)
  6. Name Service (CosNaming)
  7. Proxy service through firewall (not the standard feature proposed by OMG)
  8. SSL Support
  9. Concurrency Service (CosConcurrency)
  10. Event Service (CosEvent)
  11. Time Service (CosTime)
  12. Domain Service
Coming Soon

The first production version has been launched on July 17. Anyone feels interested may get a copy to take a look.  Anyway, an maintainence release is being prepared for bug fixes and more additional the following enhancement.
  1. Complete Chrome/Delphi mapping support.
  2. Support DII/DSI stub generation in C# and VB
  3. Implement SSL demo for Mono runtime and for .Net 2.0
  4. Implement POA Monitor in C# and VB
  5. Realtime ORB extension (RTCOBRA)
  6. Corba Time Service
  7. A plug-in module for Visual Studio.Net to ease Corba development

The future releases will include the following features.

  1. Collection Service
  2. Complete J2ee Library for accessing J2ee servers
  3. Persistent State Service
  4. Interface Repository (IR)
  5. Notification Service (CosNotify)
  6. Trading Service (CosTrading)
  7. Corba Component Model (CCM)
  8. Data Distribution Service (DDS)
  9. Fault Tolerant Service (FT)
  10. Support for Compact Framework

Woo! Lot of works to do in the coming years! Wish you to have a good start.
Good luck!

June 17, 2007

 
Remark

JacORB and OpenORB are open-source Java ORBs.
.Net, Microsoft J++ and Microsoft.Net are trademarks of Microsoft.