OMG - technical definition

Stands for Object Management Group, an open-membership consortium of computer companies committed to producing and upholding computer industry specifications for enterprise applications that are interoperable. The OMG Board of Directors contains well-known names in the computer and Internet industry including IBM, Alcatel, the Boeing Company, NASA, Sun Microsystems, and Hitachi.

OMGÂ’s star specification is the multi-platform Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), and OMGÂ’s own middleware platform is CORBA (an acronym that stands for Common Object Request Broker Architecture). CORBA is OMGÂ’s open and vendor-free architecture and infrastructure that various computer applications use to be able to function together over networks. When the standard protocol IIOP is used, a CORBA-based program from any vendor on almost any computer or operating system in any programming language and on any network can interoperate with a CORBA-based program from the same or another vendor in all of these ways. Because of how easily CORBA integrates machines from huge mainframes to desktops and PDAs, it has become the middleware of choice for many large and some smaller enterprises. One of CORBAÂ’s most common uses is in servers handling a huge volume of customers and having high hit rates but still maintaining high reliability.

Moreover, the OMG Interface Definition Language (IDL) allows interfaces to objects to be defined independently of an objectÂ’s implementation. After an interface in IDL is defined, it is used as input to an IDL compiler, whose output is to be compiled and linked with an object implementation and its clients.

See Also: Compiler; Computer; Internet; Middleware.