CORBA in Context

by Tom Welsh

Misconceptions about the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) abound. Perhaps the most pernicious is that this vendor-neutral middleware standard, although technically viable, is irrelevant to real-world computing. First we were told that CORBA was of interest only to a handful of ivory-tower software engineers, and the rest of the world would use Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM). Then it was message-oriented middleware like IBM's MQSeries that would eclipse CORBA. In the last couple of years, Java has become the CORBA-killer of choice -- an opinion embraced with special enthusiasm by some who wish neither to succeed. And all along, the whole idea of distributed object computing has been anathema to some devotees of the older -- and still perfectly valid -- procedural/relational paradigm.