In-Depth
UML and IIOP
- By Richard Adhikari
- April 1, 2002
While the OMG proceeds with its plans for UML 2.0, some observers say it is
a waste of time. They contend that UML is merely a rehash of IIOP, the Internet
Inter-ORB Protocol of the OMGÕs Common Object Request Broker Architecture
(CORBA).
IIOP lies at the core of network-based distributed computing. It maps General
Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) messages to TCP/IP so the ORB uses the Internet as
an ORB communication bus. GIOP is the methodology that ORBs need to communicate.
It maps ORB requests to different network transports. Thus, IIOP is an implementation
of GIOP.
"With IIOP there was the CORBA Interface Definition Language [IDL]. That
was fine for specifying structures of large distributed systems in terms of
specifying their interfaces, but UML goes beyond that," said Cris Kobryn,
chief technologist at Telelogic, Irvine, Calif. UML allows users to specify
interactions between distributed objects or components, what Kobryn calls complex
distributed behavior. It takes IDL further "in that you can completely
specify an architecture so that it's model-driven," Kobryn said.
About the Author
Richard Adhikari is a widely published high-tech writer based in Silicon Valley. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].