An alternative to the XOM/XMP approach is the direct access to services provided by the platform like the facilities described in the following section III-C. This is possible because a large part of the platform services is available to third-party applications through C-APIs. Therefore, we decided to encapsulate the platform interfaces with IDL wrappers so that the platform appears as a set of CORBA objects. The use of wrappers is a standard technique for migrating legacy systems into new object-oriented environments. This is feasible because the ``perception is reality''-principle applies to any kind of object-oriented system: It is not necessary that a system is implemented in an object-oriented way; the important thing is that its interfaces look like objects. Other CORBA objects can then communicate with the platform the same way as they would do with ``native'' CORBA objects. On the other hand, the use of platform-specific service APIs naturally implies the loss of independence from concrete products; the portability of the solution is thus restricted.