On bootstrapping replicated CORBA applications

Critical components of a distributed system must be replicated to achieve high availability and fault tolerance. Current fault-tolerant CORBA infrastructures have concentrated on mechanisms for object replication and recovery, while rarely considering practical issues related to the context, i.e., the CORBA middleware within the process in which the object runs. Our study shows that to replicate and recover complex CORBA applications, the behavior of the process that hosts the CORBA objects, in particular, the bootstrapping of an application, must be taken into account. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that arose when bootstrapping CORBA applications in some common scenarios, and we provide strategies to handle such difficulties so that CORBA applications can be rendered fault-tolerant.