[5571] in java-interest
Re: Inter-applet Communication
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Brinson)
Sat Feb 17 14:42:17 1996
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 10:25:45 -0800
From: tim@protocol.com (Tim Brinson)
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
Cc: alain@pomoco.com, prasad@pomoco.com
In-Reply-To: <199602161919.LAA16360@java0.javasoft.com> (owner-java-interest-digest@java.sun.com)
> Can anyone provide (or point me toward) any information about inter-applet
> communication, specifically in a multi-page environment?
I am still pretty new to java but I have some thoughts on this. I
have not tried them out yet - maybe next week.
Ideally it would be nice to not only talk to applets downloaded to
the same browser but to objects distributed across the network or
even world - as if they were local objects. That is exactly what
CORBA does for you.
At this point at least three Object Request Broker (ORB) vendors
have announced plans for CORBA products that support java in some
way - Sun, Iona, Post Modern Computing. On the Fresco mail list
there was an announcement some time ago that they are looking into
java support too. The last position I have heard from Sun and Iona
is they intend to only implement the CORBA client side for java.
The idea being that java applets could talk to CORBA objects back at
some server - most likely implemented in C++.
While the Sun/Iona solution would be usefull for many applications
it does not solve the interapplet communication problem. The java
ORB developed by Post Modern Computing (pomoco) implements the CORBA
client and server sides so that you can actually create objects in
java that any CORBA client can access (client written in C, C++,
Ada, Smalltalk, Cobol, java, etc.).
The pomoco ORB is called BlackWidow and is currently in beta. The
ORB run time library down loads into the browser and uses the java
socket library to talk the Internet InterOrb Protocol (IIOP) to
other objects. If your applet is talking to a CORBA object that is
local (e.g. another applet) then it just redirects the call instead
of going over the network.
Again, I have not tried this but you would think that the BlackWidow
ORB in the browser would stay cached and all applets using it could
communicate directly. This should be independent of what page they
were loaded from.
For more information about pomoco:
http://www.pomoco.com/
I don't know what kind of applets you are needing this for so this
solution may be overkill. On the other hand I see a lot of
applications where a higher level (than sockets) protocol is needed
to communicate between applets and distributed objects.
One thing a like about the CORBA solution is the location
transparency. The client call is just like they are talking to a
local object - if it is remote the ORB takes care of the
communication. From what I said above you can see it is also
programming language and platform transparent too.
As I have mentioned before on this mail list java and CORBA
complement each other very nicely. Java gives you the ability to
distribute your objects in a platform independent way. CORBA gives
you the ability for the distributed objects to communicate in a
platform independent way.
Regards,
~~~~~
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| Tim Brinson tim@protocol.com |
| Protocol Systems, Inc. co-chair CORBAmed |
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