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An ORB “provides the mechanisms by which objects transparently make and receive requests and responses. In so doing, the ORB
provides interoperability between applications on different machines in heterogeneous distributed environments...? ORB interoperability
extends this definition to cases in which client and server objects on different ORBs “transparently make and receive requests.?
Note that a direct consequence of this transparency requirement is that bridging must be bidirectional: that is, it must work
as effectively for object references passed as parameters as for the target of an object invocation. Were bridging unidirectional
(e.g., if one ORB could only be a client to another) then transparency would not have been provided, because object references
passed as parameters would not work correctly: ones passed as “callback objects,? for example, could not be used.
Without loss of generality, most of this specification focuses on bridging in only one direction. This is purely to simplify
discussions, and does not imply that unidirectional connectivity satisfies basic interoperability requirements.