Telephone Switches are characteristically long-lived, evolving systems. We describe how a legacy two-tier system for telephone switch management was reengineered as a three-tier web-based application using CORBA and Java. In this the design-time advantages of portability and abstraction brought by an IDL information model are combined with the universality and ease of use of a Java GUI. Performance was shown to be largely unaffected by the addition of the extra tier, while CORBA was seen to bring unexpected new advantages in the area of scripting and RAD. Keywords Web-based operation and management, PBX, CORBA, Java, information model, CORBA Scripting.
P. Hasselmeyer, M. Andrew