From legacy RPC services to distributed objects

Abstract

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) paradigm has successfully modeled several sophisticated client-server applications. It provides a simple and efficient way to develop distributed programs. The concept of RPC comes from procedure-based programming languages. As the object oriented technologies grow, the idea of invoking program entities on different address spaces also comes into the object oriented software development. The distributed object computing is the realization of this trend. This paper is intended to identify the motivations, the issues, and the design of translating RPC services into CORBA objects via reengineering processes. The conversion includes: converting RPC languages to CORBA IDL, converting RPC server implementation source codes to COBRA server object implementation source code, and converting RPC clients source codes to CORBA client object source code.