CORBAview : A visualisation tool to aid in the understanding of CORBA-based distributed applications

Middlewares provide the fundamental technology needed to create distributed applications, allowing developers to concentrate on their own specific needs. The developer may end up creating a very small part of the overall system themselves. They are able to make use of tried and tested middleware to aid in their application development. The tools provided by the CORBA middleware mean that much of the code used to create the distributed application is automatically generated for the developer. For a student learning about these middlewares, much of the development of the application that they are creating is done by pre-compiled, third party software. Understanding how the distributed application works can be difficult when you have only developed a very small part of the overall system. This paper describes CORBAview, a visualisation tool that gathers and displays the network communication and inner workings of the objects in a CORBA-based distributed application.