Techniques for transmission of message fragments between Object Request
Brokers operating in distributed object oriented environments. The techniques provide
an elegant mechanism for fragmentation of messages into sub-messages. In one embodiment,
a fragment-offset is provided as a means for determining the location of data bytes
in sub-messages with respect to the original message that has been fragmented.
During the construction and transmission of sub-messages, the fragment-offset can
be updated to indicate the current offset with respect to the original message.
Accordingly, in contrast to conventional techniques, a significant amount of computations
or bookkeeping to track of several other variables (e.g., number of fragments constructed,
total number of bytes constructed, etc.) are not required. As will appreciated,
the headers of the sub-messages need not be of the same size. Similarly, the data
portions of the sub-messages can vary in size. As a result, the techniques provides
an elegant means to determine the location of bytes in sub-messages with respect
to the original message that has been fragmented, without requiring the size of
the data fragments and header fragments to be constant.