The distributed management and visualisation platform can be considered as a three tier system since it is composed of a client, a server (the gateway itself) and the SNMP agents or HFC devices distributed on the AROMA network.

 
                                                                            Figure 4. Three tier architecture
JAVA, CORBA and Web technology were chosen to implement the system. Due to the distributed nature of the AROMA network, the implementation of a client with the ability to run on a Web browser, a JAVA applet,  on each platform and operating system was one of the requirements of the architecture.
The requirements for the server side were oriented more towards performance and stability. For that reason, it is was decided to implement the gateway side using the C++ programming language.
With these constraints, CORBA Objects Request Broker as the middleware to establish the client/gateway relationship between objects was chosen since CORBA provides platform-independent programming interfaces and models for portable distributed object-oriented computing applications. Its independence from programming languages, computing platforms, and networking protocols makes it highly suitable for the development of new applications and their integration into existing distributed systems.
The functionality provided by the system is documented using the UML visual modelling, in a use case model that illustrates the system’s intended functions (use cases), its surroundings (actors) and relationships between the use cases and the actors (use case diagrams).