Digital Symposium Collection 2000

CORBA Transactions through Firewalls D. Ingham, O. Rees, and A. Norman   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Track II: Transactions Abstract Electronic commerce on the Internet is evolving from simple customer-to-business interactions, like online shopping, to complex business-to-business extranet applications. These applications typically require back-office processing in two or more organizations. CORBA provides abstractions that make it a good technology for building such applications. Transactions are a well known technique for ensuring the overall consistency of system state in the presence of the concurrent access and occasional failure that are likely in extranet applications. The use of CORBA transactions for supporting extranet applications is complicated by the use of firewalls. Conventional firewall technology operates by restricting access based on host address and port number, and does not suit CORBA, which abstracts away from these concepts. This paper describes the issues involved and shows how they can be addressed using an advanced CORBA object gateway. Copyright(C) 2000 ACM