A situated evaluation of the Object Management Group's (OMG) Object Management Architecture (OMA)

摘要

It has been difficult to objectively assess the real value or maturity of the Object Management Group's Object Management Architecture (OMA). While experience reports have appeared in the literature, these have focused more on the functionality of the end-system than on systematically exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the OMA, and providing practical guidelines on the effective use of the OMA for specific software-engineering problems. In this paper we describe a case study in the use of the OMA to integrate legacy software components into a distributed object system. We assess the OMA in this problem context, and indicate strengths and weaknesses of the specification and current implementations. We extrapolate our experience to a broader class of component-based software systems, and recommend an architectural strategy for the effective use of the OMA to this class of systems.