DOES CORBA SUPPORT ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION?
Kind of. At the lowest level CORBA supports two modes of communication: • A synchronous request/response which allows an application to make a request to some CORBA object and then wait for a response. • A deferred synchronous request/response which allows an application to make a request to some CORBA object. An empty result will be returned immediately to the application. It can then perform other operations and later poll the ORB to see if the result has been made available. At the lowest level, the CORBA deferred synchronous communication does allow a certain degree of asynchronous communication. Polling for responses represents only one form of asynchronous communication. Other more sophisticated asynchronous communication can only be achieved by developing an architecture on top of the lowest levels of CORBA.
