Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1998/09/16/inprise_bridges_dce_and_corba/

Inprise bridges DCE and CORBA

Integrates legacy systems with e-commerce, says Graham. Hope he's not making it up...

By Graham Lea

Posted in On-Prem, 16th September 1998 16:55 GMT

Inprise - formerly Borland - has just unveiled a bridge that links Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) servers with the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker (CORBA). DCE was introduced ten years ago by the Open Software Foundation (now swallowed by the Open Group) as a distributed computing framework that was vendor-neutral and robust. Inprise's Entera is used as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment to hide some of the complexity of middleware programming. The next logical step was to Web-enable applications that support DCE by connecting to the CORBA environment, with its Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), resulting in the Inprise DCE-CORBA Bridge.The result is that legacy systems can be integrated with e-commerce applications using the Bridge, and taking advantage of DCE security. The DCE or Entera servers are linked to the Bridge by the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communications service, with IIOP the other side of the Bridge linking to CORBA clients on the Internet. DCE does not directly support TCP/IP, so the new Bridge makes it possible to keep back-end DCE applications and Web-enable them in a CORBA environment without any reprogramming. This is heady stuff, but it is part of Inprise's new focus away from direct competition with Microsoft and towards Java and Internet distributed enterprise applications. Inprise has now had five consecutive profitable quarters, so the turnaround plan put in place by CEO Del Yocam is looking successful. ®