Building CORBA objects with DOS software applications

CORBA is becoming the most important middleware that supports the object-oriented and client/server paradigm in distributed computing systems. However, the application systems based on CORBA are still scarce. One main reason is that only a few CORBA object services have been developed. To develop a new CORBA application, a programmer should make an effort to design a program with a CORBA interface from scratch. In our previous work (Liang et al., 1997), a re-engineering approach was proposed to convert RPC-based programs to CORBA objects, which successfully speeds up the development of CORBA applications. However, the source code is required in this approach. In many cases, software designers may not get hold of the source code. It will be significant to adapt existing PC application software in binary code mode to the object services under CORBA. Our study is addressing this problem. A graphical parking lot management system, which integrates dBase III and AutoCAD V2.6i under DOS has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.