Developing an example application with VisiBroker

This section uses an example application to describe the development process for creating distributed, object-based applications for both Java and C++.

The code for the example application is provided in the bank_agent.html file. You can find this file in:

<install_dir>/examples/vbe/basic/bank_agent/

Development process

When you develop distributed applications with VisiBroker, you must first identify the objects required by the application. The following figure illustrates the steps to develop a sample bank application. Here is a summary of the steps taken to develop the bank sample:

1	Write a specification for each object using the Interface Definition Language (IDL).

IDL is the language that an implementer uses to specify the operations that an object will provide and how they should be invoked. In this example, we define, in IDL, the Account interface with a balance() method and the AccountManager interface with an open() method.

2	Use the IDL compilers to generate the client stub code and server POA servant code.

With the interface specification described in step 1, use the idl2java or idl2cpp compilers to generate the client-side stubs and the server-side classes for the implementation of the remote objects.

3	Write the client program code.

To complete the implementation of the client program, initialize the VisiBroker ORB, bind to the Account and the AccountManager objects, invoke the methods on these objects, and print out the balance.