Project requirements

• Develop one or more distributed software components and demonstrate their use in a distributed system. "Develop" includes doing concept development,³ design, implementation, experimentation, testing, and documentation.
• The distributed software components you develop should fit into one of the following frameworks: the CORBA 2.0 (or higher) standard, the Microsoft DCOM specification, or both (exploring CORBA/DCOM interoperability).
• Since one of the main goals of this course is to explore how generic programming can be introduced into the realm of distributed software components, you should attempt to make your components generic in the sense of being specializable ("configurable" may be a more accurate term in this context) to many different cases.
• You may implement your components and distributed system using C++, Java, or a combination (taking advantage of the interoperability supported by ORBs such as OrbixWeb).
• In specifying and implementing your components you should avoid dependence on non-standard features provided by individual vendors, so that the components are portable to any implementation of the standard (not an issue with DCOM). In the distributed system you develop, some use of non-standard features may be necessary, but keep it as limited as possible.
• Observe the documentation requirements and guidelines given in a later section. Note the requirement of a literate programming approach. This certainly impacts your documentation but I strongly encourage you also to employ this approach throughout the in the development of the software, not as an afterthought.
• You must form teams of three or four people and submit one implementation and report for the team. You may divide up responsibilities for the project as you wish, but each member of the team should keep fully informed about the design decisions, experimental results, testing results, and documentation.
• It is better to limit the scope of your project to a small task and do an excellent job on it than to attempt too much and not be able to complete it or do it well.