Design and Implementation Requirements for CORBA Lightweight Components

This paper describes the guidelines we followed and the requirements we stated while designing and implementing the CORBA Lightweight Components (CORBA–LC) Component Model. CORBA–LC is a lightweight distributed reflective component model based on CORBA. Instead of using a traditional client/server model, it imposes a peer network model in which the whole network act as a repository for managing and assigning the whole set of resources: components, CPU cycles, memory, etc. Thus, application deployment is automatically and adaptively performed at run-time. Requirements for component description, packaging, deployment, reflection, logical network cohesion, distributed resource queries and fault-tolerant protocols are identified. Finally, we show the validity of the identified requirements in dealing with CSCW and Grid Computing applications and show how current component models fail on addressing some of these requirements.