Migration of DCE applications into CORBA and SOAP environments

摘要

Legacy applications based on the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) are subject to several significant limitations. As the development and support of DCE wanes, object-oriented development becomes more desirable, and transmission over HTTP is established as the preferred protocol over the Internet, DCE application managers and developers are pressed to find extensions and alternatives to DCE. This paper briefly discusses several alternative targets for migration of DCE systems, then proceeds to detail, compare, and contrast two preferred candidates: CORBA and SOAP. Although we have found that developing a general migration solution for legacy DCE applications to CORBA or SOAP to be a non-trivial, long-term project, developing specific solutions that are based on a general architecture is feasible. Given a short list of reasonable premises, many DCE applications may be ported to technologies such as CORBA and SOAP.