This book addresses readers interested in the design and development of distributed software systems with Java and CORBA. The programming language Java, first introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1995 in an attempt to remedy some of the deficiencies of C++, has me- while pervaded all fields of software development. CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is an industry standard that enables the platform- and programming l- guage-independent implementation of distributed object-oriented systems. When developing and testing the examples and exercises for this book, we used three diff- ent Object Request Broker products (ORBs) that are available free of charge. The first is JacORB 2.2, a Java object request broker originated in the CS department at Freie Univer- TM sität Berlin, see http://www.jacorb.org. The second one is part of Sun’s Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 Development Kit (JDK), see http://java.sun.com. The third ORB is OpenORB 1.3.1 developed by the Community OpenORB Project, see http://openorb.sf.net. Detailed information on downloading, installing, and c- tomizing these ORBs can be found in Appendix E and at the book’s website http://www. wifo.uni-mannheim.de/CORBA in subdirectory ORB.