Arctic

Description

Arctic (Arcadia CORBA 2 [Two] IIOP Core) is a modification of the University of Colorado Arpc remote procedure call system, which in turn was a reengineered version of the Sun ONC RPC system.

Arctic version 0 is the first of a planned series of messaging systems implementing the CORBA 2.0 Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP). This current version is a first prototype of that protocol. Successive versions will move closer to the IIOP. The OMG document 94.9.32, entitled ``ORB 2.0 RFP Submission'', was used as the basis for this prototype.

Warnings:

1. The Arctic interface and message format can be expected to change radically over time, especially between version 0 and version 1. This is for two reasons. First, the OMG document 94.9.32 is preliminary and changes can be expected. Second, Arctic is derived from Arpc, and it retains most of the existing Arpc interface, with all the baggage that fact implies. This interface is not completely ORB 2.0 conformant, but will move in that direction as part of the move to arctic version 1. Specifically, note that no claim is made that the interface conforms to, for example, the C interface standard of CORBA. The focus, for now, is on getting the ``bits on the wire'' to be correct.
2. This implementation is probably of use only to current users of Q and/or Arpc.

See the file doc/arctic.tex for a more detailed description of the deficiencies of arctic vis-a-vis the ORB 2.0 IIOP.

Q/CORBA version 3.3 (or later) is available and optionally runs over both arctic and Arpc. This provides a path for Ada programs to interoperate using the ORB 2.0 IIOP.

The file doc/arctic.tex contains a more detailed description of the capabilities (and deficiencies) of arctic.

I am interested in contacting other groups that are working on ORB 2.0 IIOP implementations. It should be possible to obtain some convergence on various issues apparently left undefined by the 2.0 spec.

Retrieving Arctic

Source:

ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/arcadia/arctic.tar.Z

Information file:

ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/arcadia/arctic.txt

Supported platforms

Arctic has only been successfully compiled on a SPARC running Sun OS 4.1.x and on a Pentium running Solaris 2.4. It probably can be made to compile on HPUX, IRIX, and AIX with little effort since it is derived from Arpc, which compiles on most Unix boxes.

Installation

The file INSTALL provides detailed installation instructions.

Changes

See the appendix in the file doc/arctic.tex for a detailed change history.