| Previous | Table of Contents | Next |
This specification defines a Portable Object Adapter that can be used for most ORB objects with conventional implementations.
(See the Portable Object Adapter chapter for more information.) The intent of the POA, as its name suggests, is to provide
an Object Adapter that can be used with multiple ORBs with a minimum of rewriting needed to deal with different vendors’ implementations.
This specification allows several ways of using servers but it does not deal with the administrative issues of starting server
programs. Once started, however, there can be a servant started and ended for a single method call, a separate servant for
each object, or a shared servant for all instances of the object type. It allows for groups of objects to be associated by
means of being registered with different instances of the POA object and allows implementations to specify their own activation
techniques. If the implementation is not active when an invocation is performed, the POA will start one. The POA is specified
in IDL, so its mapping to languages is largely automatic, following the language mapping rules. (The primary task left for
a language mapping is the definition of the Servant type.)