Cameron Laird's personal notes on CORBA

The OMG's CORBA Web site emphasizes marketing.

The most useful site I knew for CORBA data is the Compendium LANL used to host. It's apparently gone now. The Free CORBA page and A Brief Tutorial on CORBA appear to be the best available in 2001.

Ruminations

CORBA is a standard for distributing objects. It operates at a slightly lower level than OpenDoc. It differs from OLE in being open, and not repulsive. There's surely a better way to describe that difference, but I haven't yet thought of it. CORBA still isn't mature, in that implementations typically have lots of missing parts, but it's serious software, in that it costs a bundle (or nothing), and what is present is reliable.

[Explain IP, RPC, CORBA sequence.]

I like what sriram@iwase.tcs.com says in <4k9843$r8@gateway.tcsi.com>:

. . . The point is that CORBA makes a lot of noise about distributed objects, and does the neophyte a disservice, in my opinion, to lay emphasis only on the client side implementation and mappings. The feeling one gets after reading the popular literature (and the specs) is, if you have an ORB, you can creating reusable objects.

The correct emphasis should be : if you have an ORB, you at most get object RPC, where the remote procedures are methods of some objects. CORBA does NOT help you with your application objects, which is where all a big part of your app's reuse comes from.

Part of his point here is that the application functionality lives on the server side. [Present counter-argument]

comp.object.corba certainly started out as a high-quality newsgroup.

Gokhale and Schmidt explain their results on performance.

Iona explains its views on COM interoperation.

Why does OMG literature on-line have so many exclamation marks?

Low-cost CORBA

Among the possibilities are the CHORUS/COOL ORB, CORBA-2-supportive ORB Electra, and Bill Jannsen's ILU. Gerd Aschemann compares these and more.
Cameron Laird's notes on CORBA/claird@phaseit.net