Apache Tuscany CORBA support, GSoC proposal

1. General

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a standard that provides possibility to assemble various distributed applications and simplifies implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Ease of development using various platform services and SCA appears from unification of access method, which is transparently backed by dedicate implementation. Thus usefulness of SCA runtime depends also on number of supported platforms.

Apache Tuscany, which is implementation of SCA, can integrate with external services by binding extensions. This is main page for Apache Tuscany CORBA support project.
The goal of the project is to provide binding extensions for consuming/serving CORBA objects.

Personal motivation

My interest on project came from Google Summer of Code 2008 program.
I found Apache Tuscany and Apache Tuscany CORBA support project matches my personal technical interests. It's also great opportunity to join and realize my university projects and determine my personal development path.

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2. Scope

2.1 Functionality

Project should be separated into several functional modules.

2.1.1 binding.corba for SCA references

Enables accessing existing CORBA services from SCA components.

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From technical point of view module will be substitute for classes generated by idlj compiler, extended by some Apache Tuscany integration code.
Some useful code found under http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/tuscany/java/sca/modules/binding-ejb (Map java interfaces to IDL and Use CORBA naming/DII to lookup and call EJBs). Code contains solution for not so trivial problem of generating dynamic stubs for CORBA objects.
It's under discussion how we use existing code.

2.1.2 binding.corba for SCA services

Enables exposing SCA component services as CORBA services (so that CORBA clients can invoke SCA).

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• registering SCA services in Java IDL name servers
• handling CORBA requests by some generic engine

2.1.3 interface.idl

Support CORBA IDL as an interface definition language to define interfaces for component services/references

2.1.4 Support mapping from Java/WSDL to IDL

No detailed information available.

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2.2 Modules

Physical delivarables of project would be three modules:

• tuscany-binding-corba

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• CORBA binding extension for references/services

• interface-corba-idl

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• The interface extension for CORBA IDL

• itest-corba

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• Integration test suite for binding.corba and interface.idl

3. Timeline

Before May 26

Increasing knowledge about Apache Tuscany (read code, documentation). Time to discuss problems related to project, review samples, 'playing with' Apache Tuscany.

May 26 - July 6

First phase of the development.

July 7

Midterm evaluation.

July 8 - August 11

Second phase of the development.

August 12 - August 18

Time to review/scrub code and documentation.

About me

Education

• since October 2007 - Computer Science at Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology in Warsaw, Poland, during Master's
• October 2003 - May 2007, Computer Science at Technical University in Kielce, Poland, finished with Bachelor of Science degree

Qualities

• 3 year academic and commercial Java programming experience
• 1.5 year of experience as an IT consultant (Java, SQL programmer)
• at the moment attends theoretical and practical CORBA courses
• enthusiastic to open source software, GNU/Linux user for 6 years

Personal motivation

I found Apache Tuscany and Apache Tuscany CORBA support project matches my personal interests. Standing in front of choice of master's thesis subject I decided to go deeper in SOA and related technologies. Joining project is great opportunity to direct personal development which can be combined with fulfilling university responsibilities. No less significant is possibility to join and help community working on open source project.