Object caching in a CORBA compliant system

Abstract

Distributed object systems provide the key to build large scale applications that can execute on a range of platforms. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification from OMG attempts to address interoperability and heterogeneity issues that arise in such systems. Our goal is to investigate performance issues for distributed object systems. We claim that object caching is a must for improved performance and scalability in distributed object systems. However, to our knowledge, the CORBA specification does not address object caching. The purpose of this paper is to serve as a data point in a discussion of issues related to caching in CORBA by describing the design and implementation of Flex, a scalable and flexible distributed object caching system. Flex is built on top of Fresco that uses the CORBA object model. Fresco runs on the UNIX operating system and our implementation of Flex exploits the features of object technology, Fresco and UNIX. This system allows us to quantify the performance improvements for object invocations that are made possible by caching.