Multipurpose Servers

What we've created so far is the Java code to allow our HTTP server to be able to serve dynamic data. As we've seen, the server routes requests from normal HTTP clients to Java servlets that return HTTP-conformant requests. We've also created several Java servers that promote the distributed object paradigm. What if we were able to create a Java server that was a servlet at the same time that it was a CORBA server?

What servlets give you is the ability to access your servers in many different ways. Today, if a business is a CORBA shop and chooses to implement all their distributed processing using an ORB, they will often have to create another component altogether to allow Web-based clients to access their data. In the three-tier model, this means that the middle tier has several objects, all handling multiple types of requests and translating them into data storage and retrieval actions.