Serializing a CORBA object into a buffer

Question

Probably asked a million times but I haven't found it yet. How does one flatten an arbitrary CORBA Object to e.g. a byte[] without writing a pile of code to reinvent what the ORB has to do anyway?
I've tried the normal way of wrapping a ByteArrayOutputStream in an ObjectOutputStream and calling writeObject on that. Passing a TypeCode causes writeObject to throw NotSerializableException, while an Any containing a String results in an IOException whose message is merely the name of the package where it gave up. I guess that's the wrong approach for CORBA.
CORBA has its own org.omg.CORBA.portable.OutputStream (extends java.io.OutputStream) which looks like it should do what I want, and I've seen hints that people have used it that way, but I haven't found any example code, and I haven't found any way to specify where the output goes. What have I missed?
I want this because I'm writing a TradingService and so I need to store arbitrary objects in the database. I don't have any control of this; OMG already wrote the spec. I've begun working up methods that disassemble TypeCodes to XML and reconstitute therefrom, but I really don't want to go there.

Answer 1

don't know any specifics myself, but if you go into the javadoc for org.omg.CORBA.portable.OutputStream and click on the "Use" link at the top, you can start to see some interesting places to start looking (e.g. methods which return output streams and the Util methods for writing objects to output streams).
Edited by: jtahlborn on Feb 24, 2010 11:58 PM