After the completion of the IDL descriptions, the already existing
management functionality had to be integrated with the interfaces
i.e., the legacy code had to be migrated into the object-oriented
environment. The usual technique for achieving this is to encapsulate
the legacy code into object classes by means of so-called
wrappers. It can then be accessed easily through the new capsules
by other objects without having the need of modifying the
implementation.
Our former SNMP management agent has been implemented in C and has
obviously no object-oriented properties. As the OMG has standardized,
among others, an IDL-C language mapping, that did not matter. Much
more important is the fact that the agent code is well structured and
modular. As this was the case for our agent (see
2.1), we did not encounter severe problems while
building the new CORBA-compliant management agent.