[15] HOW DOES CORBA RELATE TO DOING INTERNET/INTRANET APPLICATIONS?
(Part of the CORBA FAQ, Copyright © 1996)

[15.1] CAN CORBA OBJECTS BE ACCESSED BY WEB BASED APPLICATIONS?

[Recently added period at end of first sentence (7/1997). Click here to go to the next FAQ in the “chain” of recent changes]

Yep.

There is a number of ways that CORBA objects can be accessed from web based applications.

1. Java applets can be downloaded via web based applications. These Java applets are capable of directly accessing CORBA objects via IIOP. There are a number of Java based ORBs available on the market. By introducing CORBA communication into a Java applet, arbitrary CORBA services can be accessed directly. These services can be developed in any language supported by CORBA or on top of any CORBA product that supports IIOP.
2. Pure HTML based application are capable of accessing CORBA objects via CGI gateways. Arbitrary unknown CORBA objects can be accessed by a single pre-compiled client application via Dynamic Invocation. A pre-compiled application can dynamically generate HTML pages based upon results obtained from arbitrary invocation of operations. This solution has the advantage of being based only upon HTML, it is not specific to a particular web browser.
3. A similar approach to the CGI CORBA gateway described above, can allow CORBA objects to be accessed without the performance impact associated with process spawning. A plug-in can be developed for a particular browser which enables it to speak directly to any CORBA object through IIOP.
4. Web servers from Netscape and Oracle are beginning to to support IIOP directly. This means that in addition to supporting HTTP, FTP access and news group access, they will be capable of accessing any CORBA object capable of supporting IIOP.

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