Binding and streams: the ReTINA approach

This paper describes engineering support for explicit binding and stream interfaces developed as part of the ACTS ReTINA project. It describes an abstract binding protocol that supports very flexible bindings, and subsumes related proposals such as the SOR binding protocol, the Spring notion of subcontract, or the notion of virtual connection from the IMA MSS specification. The paper also describes how to extend, in an upward compatible way, OMG CORBA specifications with the functions introduced by the binding protocol. Contact Authors: Fr'ed'eric DANG TRAN, Jean-Bernard STEFANI Binding and streams: the ReTINA approach 1 Introduction The object-based computational languages of the ODP Reference Model [15] and of the TINA Consortium Logical Framework Architecture [9] both comprise a notion of stream interface and allow for explicit binding between objects. Stream interfaces provide abstractions necessary to describe and refer to object interfaces 1 that are capable of generating o..