CORBA

C ommon O bject R equest B roker A rchitecture is in competition with Microsoft's OLE/DCOM object-oriented Middleware technology for business applicaions. CORBA is most popular in communications Middleware using an O bject R equest B roker ORB . CORBA evolved out of TCP/IP . DCOM is bundled with the Windows 2000 operating system but has lackluster support for other operating systems. CORBA is more flexible with other operating systems. Both CORBA and OLE/DCOM are designed to distribute objects or assembly of appplications from discreet, self-contained components. Both are appealing in the fast growing technology of "object middleware." Object middleware has corporate appeal due to the ability to provide highly abstracted object-oriented programming interfaces. Microsoft added new terminology in this area. For example, COM depicts a C omponent O bject M odel to describe the base model used for building components. The term DCOM is the Distributed form of COM. ActiveX (formerly OCX) is the packaging technology for controls and supercedes prior Visual Basic Controls known as VBX . OLE no longer means object linking and embedding. OLE now refers to a collection of technologies. For interactive computing on the web, see Distributed Network Computing . A good textbook chapter on CORBA is given at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/wwwbtb/fall.96/book/chap20/index.html . Also see RPC and http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/260wp/260wp.htm#ODBC . An excellent article that compares XML and CORBA was written by Mark Elenko and Mike Reinertsen, "XML & CORBA," Application Development Trends , September 1999, pp. 45-50. For some reason the article is not available online along with the other articles that are online at http://www.adtmag.com/ (Maybe it will be made available by the time you read this edition of New Bookmarks): It is still important to sometimes distinguish CORBA from XML. CORBA is an enabling technology for creating sophisticated, distributed object systems on heterogeneous platforms. XML is a technology for conveying structured data in a portable way. CORBA allows users to connect disparate systems and form object architectures. XML will allow users to transmit structured information within, between and out of those systems, and to represent information in a universal way in and across architectures. Both technologies are platform-, vendor- and language-independent. The conceptual fit is perfect. To see where and how this fit is best realized, we will examine how to actually combine CORBA and XML from a series of widening perspectives. ActiveX merges Microsoft's concept of Object Linking and Embedding ( OLE ) with interactive programming for the Internet. Its main main purposes for the Internet are to include live multimedia effects such as real (streaming) audio and to make it easy to bring web documents to life with virtual reality, including 360 degree video. More...