[dundee] CORBA

[Rick Moynihan]

On 29/02/2008, Barry Carr <barry at benericht.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
>  IIRC, Java comes with its own remoting libraries so you don't need CORBA (unless you really want to
>  use it). In addition, I think CORBA might have been superseded by things like of SOAP (Web-Services)
>  and REST but I could be wrong. Anybody got any more info?

If you're not concerned with cross-language RPC/Distributed-Objects
and are using Java on both ends, then you might want to look at Jini.
Jini is an incredibly powerful system for creating SOA's (from before
the SOA acronym was coined).  It was promoted by Sun quite heavily in
the early days of Java, but eventually lost an internal battle within
Sun against J2EE.

Jini's main problem has been marketing, as many of the early examples
focused on finding printers etc, many people thought it was only of
use to hardware manufacturers.

Jini has many advanced features including lookup/discovery,
downloadable (sandboxed) code proxy's which mean you can use any
protocol underneath (this is even more powerful now with JERI
(Jini/Java Extensible Remote Invocation) in Jini 2.

In my experience the hardest thing when developing Jini is managing
the classpath, as you need to be careful in managing which classes are
downloadable.  This said, Jini (as all these systems are) can be
pretty complicated to manage.

Jini was sometime ago moved under the Apache Software Foundation, and
has recently seen it's first release see:

http://incubator.apache.org/river/RIVER/index.html

http://jini.org/

>  Tim Spencer wrote:
>  > I like tp program java and am currently still learning CORBA and wanted
>  > to know if anybody knows of any real world examples, where corba has
>  > been used in the development of software.

CORBA has certainly fallen out of favour recently.  Primarily because
of the WS-* (aka WS-DeathStar) stack, though it's unclear to me
whether this stack has any clear benefits over CORBA as it's also
plagued with problems around interoperability and HUGE amounts of
complexity.  This is IMHO a problem found in all cross-platform,
RMI/distributed-object systems though.

CORBA was widely used in many applications.  The most recent one I
know of is OSA Parlay (which is a telecoms standard for managing
networks)

R.