CORBA request portable interceptors: analysis and applications

Interceptors are an emerging middleware technology enabling the addition of specific network-oriented capabilities to distributed applications. By exploiting interceptors, developers can register code within interception points, extending the basic middleware mechanisms with specific functionality, e.g. authentication, flow control, caching, etc. Notably, these extensions can be achieved without modifying either the application or the middleware code. In this paper we report the results of our experiences with CORBA request portable interceptors. In particular, we point out (i) the basic mechanisms implementable by these interceptors, i.e. request redirection and piggybacking and (ii) we analyze their limitations. We then propose a proxy-based technique to overcome the interceptors' limitations. Successively, we present a performance analysis carried out on three Java-CORBA platforms currently implementing the portable interceptors specification. Finally, we conclude our work with a case study in which portable interceptors are used to implement the fault-tolerant CORBA client invocation semantic without impacting on the client application code and on the CORBA ORB. We also release fragments of Java code for implementing the described techniques. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.