Wrapping Interactive Unix-Based Applications into CORBA Components

Abstract

Component software is now the mainstream of software development due to its superior features in maintainability, reusability and productivity. Besides, distributed applications are currently very popular for the rapid development of the Internet and CORBA is one of the main underlying infrastructures to support distributed applications. Also, nowadays there exist a large number of legacy systems in the enterprises. Wrapping the legacy systems into reusable components is an economic way for the enterprises to enhance the information processing capability. In this paper, we present an interactive wrapper technique to make Unix-based interactive legacy systems act as CORBA components. We take Unix shell as the legacy system to realize the presented technique. Besides, we compose the wrapped Unix shell component with other self-developed CORBA components to build a 3-tiers distributed component software.