Though it’s no longer trendy, CORBA is alive and well in Linux. The rumors of CORBA’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture is alive and well, and provides valuable services.
Every five years or so, a technology comes along that sounds like the solution to every software developer’s problem and the answer to every IT manager’s prayer. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) was one of those technologies. Launched in 1991, CORBA was to take the countless object-oriented, distributed, but very proprietary systems that had been developed during the 1980s and unite them under a single standard. Systems that conformed to the CORBA specification could work together transparently: applications could be assembled from whatever software components were available to provide the necessary services, regardless of what language they were written in, what operating system they ran on, or which company sold them. CORBA promised to help developers build custom distributed systems faster and cheaper than ever before. Perhaps predictably, it didn’t quite work out that way.
The first implementations of CORBA were difficult to learn, expensive to build, and so bulky and slow that they taxed even the most powerful desktop computers of the day. Still, CORBA showed potential and became popular enough that in 1996 the Object Management Group (OMG) released version 2 of the spec, making CORBA objects more sophisticated and even more compatible with each other. By that time, however, five years had passed, and another new technology promised to be the solution to all our problems: the Internet.
Suddenly, rather than trying to paste systems together with CORBA glue, companies began to think of ways to link their software services through…
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