Reengineering windows software applications into reusable CORBA objects

CORBA is becoming one of the most important middleware for supporting object-oriented and client/server paradigms in distributed computing systems. However, application systems based on CORBA are still scarce to date. One reason is that only few CORBA object services have been developed. To have a new CORBA application, a programmer must make the effort to design a program with a CORBA interface. In our previous work [Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (1997) 2], a re-engineering approach was proposed to convert RPC-based programs into CORBA objects. This has successfully increased the development of CORBA applications. However, the source code is required in this approach. In many cases, software designers cannot acquire the source code. This prevents adapting existing PC software applications, particularly for Windows applications. Our study addresses this problem. A graphic factory temperature monitor system, which integrates MS-Excel under MS-Windows, was implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.