OmniBroker is an Object Request Broker (ORB) that is compliant to the
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification as
defined in:

  The Common Object Request Broker: Architecture and Specification
  Revision 2.0, OMG Document 97-02-25

and

  IDL/Java Language Mapping, OMG document 97-03-01

OmniBroker is free for non-commercial use. See the file LICENSE for
details.

Some highlights of OmniBroker 2.0 are:

- Full CORBA IDL support

- Complete CORBA IDL-to-C++ mapping

- Complete CORBA IDL-to-Java mapping

- Uses IIOP as native protocol

- Dynamic Invocation Interface

- Dynamic Skeleton Interface

- Interface Repository

- Peer-to-Peer communication with nested method invocations

- Support for non-blocking method invocations

- Support for timeouts

- Seamless integration with X11 and Windows

- A COS compliant Naming Service

- IDL-to-HTML translator for generating "javadoc"-like documentation

- DynAny API for dynamic Any type handling

The current beta version has the following limitations:

- Only persistent (i.e. manually launched) servers are currently
  supported

- No multi-threaded C++ applications (OmniBroker for Java supports
  tread-per-request and thread-per-client)

OmniBroker was tested to work on the following platforms:

- OmniBroker for C++:

  * SGI Irix 6.2 and 6.3 with the SGI C++ Compiler 7.0.1, 7.1 and 7.2

  * SUN Solaris 2.5 with SUN C++ Compiler 4.1 and 4.2

  * SUN Solaris 2.5 with GNU C++ Compiler 2.7.2 (see the GNU C++ note below)

  * HP-UX B.10.20 with HP aC++ Compiler A.01.00 and A.01.03

  * AIX Version 4.2.1 with the AIX C Set ++ Compiler (xlC 3.1.4.6)

  * Linux 2.0 with GNU C++ Compiler 2.7.2 (see the GNU C++ note below)

  * Windows NT 4.0 with Visual C++ 4.2/5.0

  * Windows 95 with Visual C++ 4.2/5.0

- OmniBroker for Java:

  * SUN's JDK 1.0.2 or 1.1.x

  * Microsoft's Visual J++ 1.1

Support for the GNU C++ compiler (version 2.7.2) is currently only
experimental. The GNU C++ isn't fully supported yet due to the lack of
a stable exception handling mechanism. On some platforms GNU C++
doesn't support exception handling at all (e.g. MIPS), while on other
platforms the exception handling is still very buggy (SPARC, Intel).

For more information on OmniBroker, please see the OmniBroker manual
(file doc/ob.ps, in PostScript format). For installation instructions,
see the file INSTALL.
