Abstract-- The Common Object Request Broker Architecture

(CORBA) is one of the most popular standard for middleware platforms based on object technology. CORBA shields distributed applications from the heterogeneity of the bare distributed system. Till recently CORBA did not address the fault tolerance issue which is actually one of the core aspects of distributed applications running upon an heterogeneous environment. As a consequence, in the last few years many research proposals have appeared in the literature to add reliability and availability to CORBA applications. This paper first analyzes the advantages and drawbacks of such proposals and shows that none of them completely exploits the platform independence provided by CORBA. Then it proposes a novel CORBA-compliant approach, which differs in allowing the deployment of a dependable infrastructure in heterogeneous environments