Jonathan: an open distributed processing environment in Java

This paper describes a minimal and modular Object Request Broker (ORB) framework from which it is possible to build highly flexible ORBs supporting the introduction of arbitrary binding mechanisms between interacting objects. We show that such a framework consists essentially of extending the Java notion of object reference to make it distributed. Jonathan is a Java implementation of such a framework, featuring a CORBA 2.0 `personality' and several different binding factories. It could be easily extended with new binding factories and personalities (e.g. a RMI personality) or scaled down to fit particular needs.