Engineers at the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group in Seattle needed an object request broker to integrate a range of third-party software applications including, Baan, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and SDRC into one enterprise manufacturing system for the second phase of their company`s manufacturing re-engineering project.
So they chose Orbix by Iona Technologies in Cambridge, Mass. Orbix, an object request broker, helps engineers develop common object request broker architecture (CORBA) software objects and arranges for objects to access each other at run-time as defined by the CORBA specification.
"Our work in integrating a host of diverse applications into a reliable robust manufacturing infrastructure presented us with a host of challenges," says Tom Schick, senior vice president at Boeing. "However by taking the open standards-based approach offered by Orbix we have been able to develop a full featured, distributed system which has exceeded our expectations."
Orbix uses a simple database called the Implementation Repository to obtain activation information for its servers; for each server the information includes the appropriate CORBA activation mode, the name of the associated executable image, and any command-line parameters.
An important component of Orbix is its compiler technology, which translates CORBA IDL into programming language code (for example C++) that performs remote calls. The generated code is sufficiently sophisticated so that programmers are not burdened with extra programming steps. - J.M.
For more information on Orbix and Iona Technologies, contact Tom Murphy by phone at 617-949-9000, by fax at 617-949-9001, by mail to Iona Technologies Inc., 60 Aberdeen Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02138, by e-mail [email protected], or on the World Wide Web at http://www.iona.com.
