Building a Scalable and Efficient Component Oriented System using CORBA - Active Badge System Case Study

This article presents experienc gathered when implementing the localization system for an office environment in CORBA. It describes methods which enable preserving fine-grained object-oriented structure of the system and achieving efficient performance at the same time. The presented study is a practical lesson about the implementation of a scalable system oriented towards information dissemination. The key idea is to represent a large observable collection of objects by a repository that provides access to them both as individual CORBA objects and data records. The proper usage of this duality may have substantial influence on the overall system performance. The repository is equipped with a scalable notification mechanism built around a notification dispatcher and notification tree concepts. Fundamental features of the proposed solution are illustrated by a performance study and a representative application.