Release Contents

• Development Tools
• Full and lite ORBs
• Interoperable Naming Service
• Security Service including IIOP over SSL
• Common Secure Interoperability v2 (CSIv2)
• Clustering and Load Balacing
• IIOP Connection Concentrator
• HTTP tunnel
• Reference Documentation
• Tutorial

New Features in this Release

• Common Secure Interoperability (CSIv2)

  The ORB now supports the OMG CSIv2 specification for common secure interoperability between the various CORBA implementations. The CSIv2 specification includes support for username/password based and public key based client authentication, Identity Assertion, and IIOP over SSL and TLS.

• Load Balancing and Fail Over

This proprietary feature of the ORB allows developers to create clusters of servers using the Portable Object Adapter APIs. The requests can be automatically load balance to the various servers as well as failed over to another server in the cluster when the original server fails or is not accessible.

• Upgraded IIOP Protocol

The ORB's IIOP protocol implementation has been upgraded to version 1.2 including support for receiving fragmented messages. The product continues to interoperate with IIOP versions 1.0 and 1.1.

• Interoperable Naming Service Enhancements

The latest Interoperable Naming Service OMG specification changes, including the support for corbaname and corbaloc URLs, is now part of the ORB. The product continues to support the older iioploc, iiopboot, and iiopname URL formats.

• ORB Monitoring APIs

The product now includes support for monitoring the various runtime variables like number of requests, connections, threads, memory usage etc. These APIs are also used by other products in the Messaging Platform family (like JMS and JTS) to display their specific properties.

• Support for Internet clients via tunneling thru HTTP

The ORB's tunneling feature allows client applications running on the Internet to be able to invoke on servers running inside the firewall. This is achieved via tunneling IIOP requets/responses thru HTTP. This feature requires a Web Server with support for HTTP Servlet APIs.

• Enhancements for Object Transaction Service (OTS) v1.2

The ORB is OTS 1.2 aware. An OTS compliant Transaction Manager is installed and registered with the ORB, such that transactional object references can be created and served using the POA APIs. The client and server side transaction interceptors enforce the various OTS policies.

• IIOP Interoperability with J2EE 1.3 Reference Implementation

This release of the ORB has gone through extensive IDL and RMI interoperability testing with the Sun's J2EE reference implementation.

Incomplete Features and Known Bugs

• idl2java -dynamic only works with CORBA 2.2 IDL, and should really be used if you plan to generate stubs and skeletons to use with the Java IDL reference implementation inside JDK.
• The Dynamic Any API is not supported.
• No Interface Repository implementation is shipped with the ORB.

The ORB is currently supported on Windows 2000/2003 and XP, Solaris Sparc 2.6+, Linux Red Hat 7.x/8, and NetWare 6.5. The following JDKs are supported:

JDK 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 (Java 2 Standard Edition)

• Sun Win32 JDK 1.2 or higher production release
• Sun Linux JDK 1.2 or higher production release
• Sun Solaris JDK 1.2 or higher production release
• Novell JVM 1.4.1 for NetWare

Documentation

This release comes with reference documentation as well as a tutorial that will familiarize you with the various features of the ORB.

• API Reference
• ORB Tutorial

Bug Reports and Feedback

Please use extendsupport@novell.com for feedback, comments, and bug reports.