ORB Settings
The Enterprise Server includes a high performance and scalable CORBA Object Request Broker
(ORB). The ORB is the foundation of the EJB Container on the server.
Overview
The ORB is primarily used by EJB components via:
■
RMI/IIOP path from an application client (or rich client) using the application client
container.
■
RMI/IIOP path from another Enterprise Server instance ORB.
■
RMI/IIOP path from another vendor’s ORB.
■
In-process path from the Web Container or MDB (message driven beans) container.
When a server instance makes a connection to another server instance ORB, the rst instance
acts as a client ORB. SSL over IIOP uses a fast optimized transport with high-performance
native implementations of cryptography algorithms.
It is important to remember that EJB local interfaces do not use the ORB. Using a local interface
passes all arguments by reference and does not require copying any objects.
How a Client Connects to the ORB
A rich client Java program performs a new initialContext() call which creates a client side
ORB instance. This in turn creates a socket connection to the Enterprise Server IIOP port. The
reader thread is started on the server ORB to service IIOP requests from this client. Using the
initialContext, the client code does a lookup of an EJB deployed on the server. An IOR which
is a remote reference to the deployed EJB on the server is returned to the client. Using this
object reference, the client code invokes remote methods on the EJB.
InitialContext lookup for the bean and the method invocations translate the marshalling
application request data in Java into IIOP message(s) that are sent on the socket connection that
was created earlier on to the server ORB. The server then creates a response and sends it back on
the same connection. This data in the response is then un-marshalled by the client ORB and
given back to the client code for processing. The Client ORB shuts down and closes the
connection when the rich client application exits.
Monitoring the ORB
ORB statistics are disabled by default. To gather ORB statistics, enable monitoring with this
asadmin command:
ORBSettings
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