Distributed Object Technology to Support Web Access of Heterogeneous Data and Information Sources

We have utilized distributed object technology to support web access of distributed heterogeneous data and information sources including NODC's web access to CoastWatch retrospective AVHRR image data. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) technology is implemented in this web-based client/server application. Previously, the NODC's software required that the image database be co-located on the Web server. By using the CORBA distributed object technology, we were able to separate the database functions and the web server functions. The database now resides on one Unix machine and the web server resides on another. Communication between the database and the web server is handled by the CORBA middle-ware. This also allow us to re-use the legacy codes resides on the data server machine to access the database. The CGI technology has been replaced by Java Servlets because servlets are portable, efficient and powerful. Java Servlets also make the Java/CORBA implementation easy. The resulting system is more flexible, faster, stable, robust, and can be easily expanded to include other data sets residing on other servers.