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HOMEWORK 3
Assigned: November 17,
1999
Due: November 30, 1999 (before class)
Please use outside sources
of information (not your classmates) where you deem necessary.
Note: Please hand in printed
versions of the homework assignment on the due date.
1.(10) Explain briefly what you understand by the following terms:
Use Outside sources if necessary.
a) RPC
b) Stubs
c) IIOP
d) ORBs
e) Distributed Computing Environment(DCE).
2.
a)(2) Give two differences between CORBA and DCE.
b)(3) What are the three technologies that CORBA combines?
3.(5) What are the two types of Enterprise Java Beans and explain the difference between them.
(Hint: You can refer to http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/index.html)
4. HealthCo is a national healthcare provider. Its CIO and your boss, Prithvi Rao, had attended a conference where he was impressed with a demo by Dr. Peter Hendler, who presented a CORBA enabled healthcare solution - WebChart.
Upon his return, he immediately summoned you in his office to talk to you about his great experience. As a manager of Technology Innovations at HealthCo you are to evaluate the product and see if it matches HealthCo's needs.
HealthCo is a company very similar to Kaiser Permanente. Mr. Rao also provided you with a useful article:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-1998/jw-11-kaiser_p.html , which you should use in your analysis.
In particular, Prithvi is concerned with:
1) (5) Brief explanation of architecture of this application.
2) (10) Pros and cons of implementing Webchart. As a busy man, he likes to see bulleted reports of about one page or less. He also likes when people divide issues in the following categories:
 | People - e.g. Issues directly associated with the organization. What are the biggest people obstacles/advantages to implementing such a system? |
| Process - e.g. How could WebChart affect the processes within the organization? Do you see any additional costs/savings by changing those processes? |
| Technology - e.g. What is really the difference between CORBA based technology and other paradigms (mainframe w/ dumb terminals etc.) (two columns [CORBA vs. other] with key points will do). Why is this such a great value proposition? Any drawbacks? |
Once you are done with your brief analysis, you should make a recommendation to the CIO. Please note that as a manager, you might be right no matter which option you pick, as long as there is a clear analysis supporting your opinion.
You shouldn't have to refer to outside sources (other than the above link) to get answers to this question, but try to
think about how you would analyze such system in terms of an organization where there are many forces acting upon a decision (as can be seen in case of Kaiser).
Go through the tutorial, it will give you good insights into what some potential pros and cons might be.
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