Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) simplifies distributed systems software in several ways using an object-oriented paradigm that hides all differences between programming languages, operating systems, and object location, says Dr. R. Srinivasan.

Today the great start line is, "The network is the computer". Any attempt towards e-Governance will utilize the power of the networking so that applications distributed across the various segments of the government can be integrated to provide useful information at any point of time from anywhere. In my last article, I had mentioned that in order to achieve this efficiently, the Government should adopt a standard architecture based on which the applications are built and interfaced. This is a must because the applications of today and the future will have an increasing demand for high performance, large data volumes, large bandwidth and short latencies. We should also keep in mind the need for reusability of applications developed today, at an enormous cost, that would become legacy in future. Until recently, we had the inherent difficulty of distributed application programming and the lack of standard interfaces between applications; however with Internet becoming the back bone, special areas like e-Commerce, EAI, and all kinds of e-interactions are now possible because of evolution of standard and proprietary middleware architectures.

As a defacto standard the effort was by the Object Management Group (OMG) which is an industry consortium with its mission defining a set of interfaces for interoperable software. Its first specification, 'Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)', is now an accepted industry standard that defines a higher-level facility for distributed computing. In their book on 'The Essential CORBA' Thomas Mowbray and Ron Zahavi, say that CORBA simplifies distributed systems software in several ways, using an object-oriented paradigm that hides all differences between programming languages, operating systems, and object location. With its et of standard specifications along with Internet Interface Object Protocol (IIOP), CORBA is becoming popular as a standard middleware in many domains across the Internet based transactions. The main feature of CORBA is that it is a peer-to-peer computing facility where all applications are objects or component-based.

Highly flexible architectures can be implemented using CORBA rather than the pure Client/Server architectures imposed by Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). Moreover, CORBA supports a standard portable notation to cater to interfacing called Interface Definition Language (IDL), which is the universal notation for defining software boundaries. Vendors have now implemented mappings to many languages life C, C++, Small Talk, etc. Getting accepted as the industry standard for interoperability, the proprietary vendors of middleware have started bringing out bridges to CORBA.

CORBA is now a feature built into all cross platform middleware, all J2EE application servers, all Java environments and many Fortune 500 companies have started adopting CORBA. Having introduced that, CORBA is becoming the defacto standard in enterprise application integration, let is see a typical architecture that could be considered for e-Governance.

A suggested architecture for e-Governance is shown in the diagram where it is illustrated that Applications from various departments can be integrated together, so as to be accessed by any terminal or computer from any other department or anywhere through the network. This is because of the characteristics of CORBA - it is location transparent, language independent, implementation independent, architecture and Operating System independent. The applications connected through CORBA/IIOP could be legacy applications wrapped around to suit CORBA specifications or any new Web application, or could be even a data base environment using Oracle, etc. Seamless interconnection and thereby effective utility of the entire system of e-Governance is possible, if the middleware is designed to have the necessary services like Transactions, Data Base, Management, Messaging and Naming.

Regarding security aspects, CORBA Security standard is built around existing security specifications such as Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), the Kerberos Protocol and Generic Security Service (GSS) API. While these technologies are heavily weighted, Public Key Security with Secured Socket Layer (SSL) is popular with Internet based transactions.