3.1.3 Information model

As the main focus of CORBA is not bound to network and systems management, ASN.1 is not used for defining management information. Instead, the description of CORBA objects is established by specifying their interfaces in the Interface Definition Language (IDL). IDL is a means of presenting the interfaces of all objects connected to an ORB system in a uniform way. Clients issue requests to servers without the need to take care on which kind of architecture or under which operating system the servers are running. Even the language in which servers are implemented is shielded by IDL. Each managed object class is defined by one IDL interface describing attributes and operations of the managed objects; managed objects can inherit from other objects as CORBA yields all the advantages of object-orientation. If new object implementations are introduced into the ORB runtime system, their interfaces are registered in the Interface Repository. The interface repository can be thought of as a distributed database which contains the interface descriptions of any object known throughout the ORB. Together with the DII (see above), the interface repository decouples the managing system from changes occurring at managed systems.

It is therefore not necessary (as it would be with the OSI- and Internet management architectures) to keep a backup image of each managed systems' interface as a MIB in the memory of the managing system. Inconsistency problems in case of a change to an agent are avoided, too.