CODEX: Content-oriented data EXchange model on CORBA

Asynchronous Data Exchange (ADE) is useful in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It needs a well-defined mechanism to support data buffing, dispatching, and filtering. ADE is more flexible, extensible and scalable than the synchronous one. CORBA Event Service, announced by OMG, offers an easy-to-use, abstract and generic communication mechanism, while providing message delivering, dispatching and buffering by way of introducing the concept of event channels. However, it lacks some practical data exchange functions. This paper proposes the design and implementation of a system named CODEX (stand for Content-Oriented Data EXchange system), which combines the XML features and the functionality of CORBA (which stands for Common Object Request Broker Architecture) Event Service. The CODEX system equips functions of primitive data type checking, message classification, content filtering and source/destination screening. Application developers can focus more on business functions, instead of caring about the detail of data exchange. The concept and architecture of the content-oriented data exchange, provided by CODEX, can be applied to other practical computing fields in the large-scale, loosely coupled distributed computing environments. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.