Connecting Clients to IOM Servers

SAS Integration Technologies facilitates client/server communication across multiple vendor architectures by supporting multiple client/server interoperability standards. The illustration below depicts the different ways that clients and IOM servers can communicate.

As shown in the illustration, Windows clients written in languages such as Visual Basic or Visual C++ access IOM servers running in the Windows operating environment using Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM/DCOM). Windows client interfaces provided in SAS Integration Technologies support two leading industry standards: ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) and Object Linked Embedding for Databases (OLE DB).

Windows clients accessing IOM servers on non-Windows server platforms use the IOM Bridge for COM. This bridge allows you to develop native COM/DCOM applications that access server data, for example, on UNIX and mainframe platforms. This transparency is a key feature of SAS Integration Technologies. It enables application developers to have full access to the architectural elements available in the Windows environment, even when their clients communicate with servers in other operating environments. The bridge makes other operating environments appear to be extensions of the client's native operating environment.

Java clients that access IOM servers use the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). CORBA is an architecture for an open software bus on which objects can interoperate across networks and operating systems.

The Object Request Broker (ORB) is the key element of CORBA. It provides the infrastructure for distributed object computing by enabling software components (objects) on one machine to locate and communicate with components on other machines. This infrastructure enables you, as an application developer, to focus on implementing your business logic instead of worrying about all the underlying technology.

SAS Integration Technologies provides an ORB called the IOM bridge for Java. This ORB implements the standard CORBA ORB interface defined by the Object Management Group (OMG). It uses a proprietary inter-orb protocol (called the IOM Bridge protocol) to communicate with the IOM server.

Release 8.2 of SAS Integration Technologies includes support for using a CORBA ORB on your server platform. This feature enables you to use standard CORBA client ORBs and communicate with the server using the IIOP protocol. This feature has a status of Developer's Release in Release 8.2.