Re: Which way to the Object Web?

Jeff Bone (jbone@activerse.com)
Mon, 14 Sep 1998 11:58:10 -0500

I guess I should have set up my query a little better... I had a brief
but intense fling with CORBA a few years back. I've been buried
head-down in Javaland for the last few years. My company was a really
early user of RMI (spring '96, pre-alpha, and we used it in essence as a
transport for object migration / mobile agents) though we ultimately
ended up using a more traditional on-the-wire protocol approach to
building a distributed event framework. What I'm trying to figure out
here isn't really specific to anything job-related... I'm just kind of
feeling around to see if there is a general impression that CORBA is
dead, going forward, a good thing, a bad thing, etc.

It seems to me that there's at least one reasonably-defensible point of
view that says that CORBA solves many of the thorny DO problems. I'm
not espousing that point of view, but I'm interested in hearing the
arguments against. (I have my own; I'm interested in hearing others.)

> True, there seems to have been a resurgence of commercial interest
> in CORBA in the last 12 months or so.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm sensing, that's why I'm re-curious...
what's driving that? EJB solely?

> You think the corba specs are displaying maturity? Which ones?

POA looks a *lot* better than BOA. For starters.

> You think the products are matured?

Well, the Visigenic's performance has improved dramatically...

> Want a bit more detail?

Thanks, will take a look!

> Or, if you *really* want to learn the inside skinny on corba,

Plug, plug. :-) No, thanks, been there done that, just trying to
figure out why there's new interest.

jb