OpenFusion CCM CORBA Component Model

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Simplifying the development and deployment of mission-critical systems

Building on the CORBA Success Story
CORBA is a well established technology in many industry sectors such as defense, telecommunications, software defined radio, financial services, manufacturing and continues to be the most successful open standard in supporting distributed heterogeneous mission critical systems that require exceptional levels of performance and QoS.

The CORBA object model is the industry standard, cross- platform, cross-language distributed object model for mission-critical systems. The CORBA object model enables software applications to invoke operations on distributed objects without concern for object location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols, interconnections or hardware.

The OMG adopted the CORBA Component Model (CCM) to extend the original CORBA object model to support component based applications. The CCM is included in the CORBA 3 specification and extends the CORBA 2 object model by defining features and services that enable application developers to implement, manage, configure, and deploy components that integrate commonly used CORBA services, such as transactions, security, persistent state, and event notification services, in a standard environment. CCM also allows greater software reuse for servers and provides greater flexibility for deploying and configuring CORBA applications.

Benefits of Component Based Development
Component based software development focuses on building software systems by integrating existing software components. The aim of this approach is to ensure that individual parts of software applications are written only once rather than many times. Software applications are assembled through reuse of pre-built components rather than being rewritten from scratch.

Benefits of component based software development include:
• Altering development emphasis from programming software to composing software systems
• Reduction in time to market for new applications
• Increases reuse of existing software
• Better software reuse improves software quality and reduces maintenance costs
• Provides a much cleaner separation of concerns – container programming model hides many of the underlying middleware complexities from the developer

CCM components are the basic building blocks in a CCM system. A major strength of CCM derives from standardizing the component development cycle using mature CORBA 2 products as its middleware infrastructure. Component developers using CCM to define the IDL interfaces that component implementations will support. Next, they implement components using tools supplied by CCM providers. The resulting component implementations can then be packaged into an assembly file, such as a shared library, a JAR file, or a DLL, and linked dynamically. Finally, a deployment mechanism supplied by a CCM provider is used to deploy the component in a component server that hosts component implementations by loading their assembly files. Components therefore execute in component servers and are available to process client requests.

OpenFusion CCM
Is a commercially supported and professionally packaged CCM implementation, based on a strategy of industrializing and offering a full commercial support service around Open Source implementations of the technology. This approach has been successfully deployed over many years with PrismTech’s OpenFusion versions of TAO and JacORB, which support many large mission-critical production systems.

OpenFusion CCM incorporates:
• C++ and Java™ CCM containers that simplify the development of portable and interoperable application component logic.
• Pluggable services, such as Naming & Event that can be declaratively configured into the CCM containers and used as required.
• A Deployment & Configuration (D&C) infrastructure that automates application component assembly and launching.
• Model Driven Engineering (MDE) tool set to automate key aspects of application development, deployment and configuration.
• Runtime tooling to support supervisory control and monitoring of deployed systems.

The OpenFusion CCM Advantage
• Accelerated development
- The OpenFusion CCM architecture removes many of the complexities of developing complex CORBA systems.
- Combined with MDE Tooling to auto-generate most of the infrastructure code, improves developer productivity significantly and reduces development costs.
• Accelerated deployment
- The OpenFusion CCM D&C architecture provides a standards based and automated way to configure and deploy CORBA applications. As the system evolves over its life time this makes it much easier to upgrade and re-configure the system.
• Improved system quality and reduced maintenance costs
- OpenFusion MDE tooling, supporting model validation and auto code generation improves code quality by removing many defects at design time rather than runtime, reducing overall maintenance costs.
• Flexible licensing
- No development or deployment license fees for Open Source product components e.g., containers, D&C etc.
• Predictable costs
- Open Source technology covered by an annual support contract.
- Standard commercial software license terms for COTS MDE Tools.
• Superior technology - the most advanced QoS enabled SOA for Net-Centric Mission Critical systems.
• Commercially supported by a company with a proven track record.
• On-going development of the technology - PrismTech are committed to evolving and developing OpenFusion CCM.
• Committed roadmap - PrismTech will provide OpenFusion CCM customers with a committed product roadmap and release schedule so that they and their systems can benefit from future developments of the technology in a predictable way.

Platform Availability
• OS: Linux
• JDK: 1.5
• ORBs: TAO, JacORB
For an up to date list of supported platforms or to request support for a platform not listed above please contact PrismTech.