DDS & CORBA in Open Architecture Computing Environment OACE

The goals of the Open Architecture (OA) in warfighting systems for the US navy and other military organizations include: reducing total cost of ownership, making systems change and upgrade easier and faster, lowering the impact of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computing refreshes, and reducing compatibility and interoperability problems.

The navy's initiative to implement OA design consistently across its programs is called the Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE). All future combat system software development efforts are to be based on OA design precepts.

OACE is based on international computing standards and OACE components include the equipment, operating systems and middleware.

Standarized middleware is a major infrastructure component of the OACE. The key being the choice of standards-based products rather than proprietary solutions.

The first of these middleware standards is for distributed objects. Multiple different distributed object protocols are currently in use. These protocols allow the exchange of information by invoking methods on an object that may reside at some other location on a network. Of these only the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a formal standard that is platform neutral, has interfaces available across multiple computer languages and is supported by a vendor neutral industry consortium. The CORBA standard is managed by an active industry standards group of approximately 800 members - the Object Management Group (OMG). Extensions to the core standard provide for interoperability of products from different vendors, real-time support, fault tolerance, transactions, object registration and discovery, event notification and many other features.

PrismTech offers a number of CORBA products that meet the needs of the OACE.
• Object Request Brokers (ORBs)
• Commercially supported open source ORBs: OpenFusion JacORB and OpenFusion TAO.
• Highly performant real-time embedded ORBs with tiny footprint, OpenFusion e*ORB SDR.
• A full set of CORBA Services including: OpenFusion Notification Service, OpenFusion Trading Service, and OpenFusion Log Service.
• A commercially supported and professionally packaged CORBA Component Model implementation - OpenFusion CCM

The second of the middleware standards is publish-subscribe, which supports the distribution of potentially high-volume, low latency data from anonymous servers to anonymous clients. Publish-subscribe middleware is widely used to support the development of systems that are highly extensible. Data distributed in this way can be accessed by any application that declares itself a subscriber, thus making it easy to add new functionality without requiring the addition of new interfaces. The OMG has recently adopted a specification in this area, the Data Distribution Service (DDS) specification for real-time systems.

PrismTechs DDS implementation, OpenSplice DDS, is a full implementation of the DDS specification and offers a real-time information backbone. The OpenSplice DDS architecture is characterized by autonomous applications with minimal dependencies where function and interaction are clearly separated and OpenSplice DDS agents act as real-time information brokers. OpenSplice DDS thus offers a normalized environment that is designed once for all applications and which delivers the "right information at the right place at the right time".

For further information about how any of PrismTech's middleware products can be used to implement the OACE please contact us by e-mailing: info@prismtech.com