CORBA Time/Date Service (Assignment 1)

Overview

In this assignment, you will implement a remote time and date service using CORBA. Applications can use this service to determine the current time and date in a network. In this service, CORBA remote operations are used to request the current date and time from a particular machine.

CORBA IDL Specification

The CORBA remote time/date service will be designed as a client/server pair using the following IDL specification:


// IDL schema definition for Time and Date interface.
interface Time_Date
{
  /// Obtain the time and date in binary format.
  void bin_date (out long time_date);

  /// Obtain the time and date in string format.
  void str_date (out string time_date);
};

The time and date can be returned as either a binary number or as a string. If the number is returned as a binary then you can converted it into a string and printed to the stdout of the user using the ctime(3c) C library function. If the number is returned as a string then you don't need to do any conversions. Note that by returning the time and date as a long you'll save on network bandwidth.

You will use a CORBA IDL compiler to translate this specification into client-side stubs and server-side skeletons. The client application (which you must write) will use the stubs as a proxy to access the time and date service implemented by the server. In addition, you must also write the server, which implements the bin_date() and str_date() operations that provide the time and date service.

Server Functionality

On the server-side, you'll need to define a class that inherits from the skeleton generated by the IDL compiler. The C++ class for this should look something like the following:


// Implement the Time_Date interface.

class Time_Date_i : virtual public POA_Time_Date
{
public:
  // constructor
  Time_Date_i ();

  /// Obtain the time and date in binary format.
  virtual void bin_date (CORBA::Long_out time_date);

  /// Obtain the time and date in string format.
  virtual void str_date (CORBA::String_out time_date);
};

To implement the bin_date() operation you'll need to use the time(2) system call. To implement str_date() operation you'll need to use the ctime(3c) library function to convert the time on the server into an ASCII string representation of the time. I recommend that you check your OS documentation for more details on using these functions.

In addition, you'll need to implement a main() function that defines an instance of Time_Date_i, obtains and activates the RootPOA, and then calls CORBA::ORB::run() method to run the server's event loop. To make your life easy, the server should write its IOR to a file before it calls the ORB's run method (later, we'll use more advanced techniques, such as a Naming Service). Thus, when your server is started, you should create a file called time-date.ior that contains something like the following

IOR:000000000000001649444c3a43756269745...

if you use the -ORBObjRefStyle IOR IOR format or

iioploc://1.1@tango.dre.vanderbilt.edu:10015/P35ad159600081a38/\0\1server

if you use the -ORBObjRefStyle URL IOR format. For more information on these options, please see the TAO online options documentation.

Client Functionality

The client program should read the name of the time-date.ior file that contains the IOR discussed above. When the client starts up, it can read the contents of this file using the CORBA::string_to_object() method to convert the string into an object reference. In TAO, you can do this with a single CORBA::string_to_object() call by passing it the "file://time-date.ior" string. The object reference returned from this call will then be downcast via _narrow() to an object reference for the Time_Date interface. At this point, the client can call the bin_date() and str_date() operations via the object reference to obtain the time/date from the server.

For the purposes of the assignment, you can make the client-side driver program very simple. The client can read a command from its standard input and send it to the server. For example, you could the following commands to the client:


% ./client
> b
Binary time is 71478939
> s
String time is Thu Nov 14 5:49 1996

Since the client and server communicate via the time-date.ior file there's no need to indicate the server name when you invoke the client. In a ``real'' application, we'd use a Naming Service to remove the need for a shared file between the client and server.

Once the client application has bound to an object reference for the Time_Date interface, it can call the designated operations via the object reference proxy. The client should simply print out the appropriate exception and exit with a return status of 1 if anything fails to work properly. If everything works correctly, the program should exit with a return status of 0.

Make Project Creator

A Make Project Creator (MPC) file has been created for your convenience. You can get a copy of this file here.

Learning and Using CORBA

We will be using the TAO CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB) implementation. Please see the online help for information on how to setup your TAO development environment on EECS's computing system.

Concluding Remarks

This first CORBA assignment is very simple. However, it will illustrate the basic skills required to become adept at using CORBA component middleware to developed distributed applications. Subsequent assignments will build on this assignment, so make sure you get it working correctly.

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