[Enterprise Extensions only]

Identifying and resolving CORBA interoperability issues

By embracing the CORBA open architecture, WebSphere can work with new and old applications from different vendors. Since complete compatibility between CORBA ORBs is not yet available, this section describes issues that you may encounter when working with different ORBs, and provides some strategies to resolve these issues.

Compliance statements by ORB vendors do help to identify a set of features that can be expected to function appropriately within a distributed environment involving multiple instances of the same ORB. However, compliance does not assure interoperability between different ORBs.

When trying to resolve an interoperability problem, first review the fundamentals: the communication link (GIOP/IIOP). Ensure that both the client and server ORBs support the expected features. Next, begin at your point of failure in the steps below. Review the information provided in the linked topics, and if needed consult the CORBA specification. The CORBA specification also includes comments on differences between different levels of the GIOP specification.

Failure to interoperate between a CORBA client and a servant object is, by its very nature, manifest in the external communication protocols between the two. If interoperability fails, check the following in sequence:

  1. Check the communication links: CORBA communication protocols (GIOP/IIOP).
  2. Check the use of the naming service: C++ CORBA client, locating the root naming context (bootstrapping) and C++ CORBA client, locating a servant object.
  3. Check for unsupported CORBA valuetypes and data types: CORBA value type considerations and Resolving unsupported CORBA data types.