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