This document gives an introduction to programming distributed applications with JacORB, a free Java object request broker. JacORB comes with full source code and a number of example programs. Additionally, both IDL and Java code for all OMG object services defined in [3] is also included in this distribution. This document is not an introduction to CORBA in general. Please see [6, 7] for this purpose.
The IDL-Java language mapping provided by the JacORB IDL compiler is close to the OMG standard in [5]. Most of the differences between these mappings should not be important or even visible for application programmers. A detailed description of our language mapping will be part of future versions this document which will hopefully be more complete than the present one.
The rest of this document is structured as follows. First, we briefly describe how to obtain and install JacORB. Section 2 gives a few examples on how to use JacORB to write distributed Java programs while section 3 contains a description of the utilities that come with JacORB.