Talk:Common Object Request Broker Architecture

Interface Definition/Description Language

Modification note (7/1/2003)

I just thought I'd clear this up to avoid a mod-war. IDL stands for Interface Definition Language, *not* Interface "Description" Language. It was recently changed incorrectly to the latter. I've put it back the way that it was. See the CORBA spec p 3-1.

 (Derek)

I noticed that someone broke my change above when doing some edits. I've re-edited it so that it is now correct once more.

 (Derek)

According to [Douglas Comer]'s Book Computer Networks and Internets with Internet Applications, 4/e, both uses of the term IDL when talking about RPC stuff are valid. Subwy (talk) 18:16, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Nick Stavros (talk) 20:33, 4 October 2013 (UTC) OMG has forked the IDL specification. The original IDL which is part of the CORBA specification remains "as-is" and untouched. The same baseline has been lifted from the CORBA specification and is available as a stand alone specification referred to as IDL 3.5.

This was done in order that IDL be allowed to evolve independently from CORBA with the caveat that the support for CORBA not be broken.

I propose that the OMG IDL link in the disambiguation page be changed to point to a new wiki page on 'OMG IDL' the stand alone IDL and that a link be placed into the new page back to this page.

IDL is now an integral part of many other OMG specifications and a new version 4.0 is expected soon.

CORBA/Common object request broker architecture

68.167.249.197 23:44, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC): I'd suggest that it is standard practice to have the main article body for CORBA/Common object request broker architecture to be under the fully expanded version of the name (cf. Remote procedure call/RPC, and File transfer protocol/FTP to name two examples).

That's right! I am sexy 23:46, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I would argue that File transfer protocol should be moved to FTP, though Remote procedure call should stay as it is. This is because there is not just one file transfer protocol. Having a page title like "File transfer protocol" or "Common object request broker architecture" implies that there is more than one - for example - "a file transfer protocol is..." or "a common object request broker architecture", whilst "an FTP" or "a CORBA" is less appropriate. Dysprosia 06:40, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

68.167.249.2 09:02, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC): Admittedly "file transfer protocol" can be generically used, but I disagree about "common object request broker architecture" which has established itself as a specific standard. That is emphasized outside of wikipedia by capitalizing all the words. Additional examples, like OSI, DNS, SNMP, LAN, FDDI, SMTP, ICMP, RARP all redirect to the full words, though HTTP doesn't.

an exception proving the rule; disambig COBRA and CORBA

68.167.249.197 00:03, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC): One good standard practice within wikipedia is to not disambiguate misspellings. I agree that this is a good guideline to follow. As I also note at Talk:COBRA, I would contend that COBRA vs. CORBA is a case where the exception proves the rule. This is a case of two five-letter acronyms, which is unusual. For two acronyms of that length (and, to get perhaps overly analytical about it, the fact that B and R are both typed by the left index finger on a QWERTY keyboard), isn't a reasonable to anticipate our audience would appreciate such a disambiguation here? I would never advocate disambiguation for TLAs. but this seems a case where a good rule has a reasonable exception.

68.167.249.2 09:02, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC): Dysprosia's suggestion elsewhere of a disambiguation block prefacing the CORBA page seems like the best of both worlds to resolve this.

KDE Using CORBA

Wasn't KDE using CORBA and then dropped it? 81.151.193.21 17:10, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

That was GNOME, I believe; KDE fanboys at the time often pointed to the CORBA-usage as a sign of the over-engineering which they believed plagued the GNOME project. --217.128.105.9 14:50, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

The CORBA in GNOME is not dropped and still used. Audriusa 07:54, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Images?

Hi. What are these supposed to indicate? Why are they not defined? Thanks. --ChrisRuvolo 01:53, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Developmant Status. In researching the links I found project which are not fully developed and/or which have not been updated for many years. With the % rating on what to expect when following the link. If you know the project and find the rating unfair you are free to correct - just be honest - a project with barely make minimum feature set and has seen no update for 3 years should not be marked 100%. --Krischik 06:49, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the info. I don't mind their use, but in the article it should be defined what they represent.. and then what the various implementations are lacking (justification of each 50% rating for example). They won't be able to be interpreted usefully otherwise. --ChrisRuvolo 16:23, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand your context - what images? 68.100.20.83 (talk) 00:35, 17 November 2007 (UTC) Sorry for not logging in, I'm Seaneparker (talk) 00:36, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Current status

Information about the current status of CORBA is needed. What alternatives are there? Is it evolving? Are there new developments that use CORBA?

I'd love to provide a status but I'm neither a member of the OMG nor do I work with CORBA at the moment (I did at my last job last month :-) What would you like the format to be? i.e. links to "current projects"? White papers? Conference references? New standards in process? Seaneparker (talk) 00:38, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

• CORBA is very much alive. There are many ongoing CORBA related specifications being created - especially where quality of service issues are important. Btw, do not believe any one talking about the rise and fall of CORBA, most such talks are led by those who are trying to create new specifications created by a handful of distributed computing engineers (compare that to CORBA created over nearly 2 decades by hundreds of distributed computing specialists and domain experts). False references in this wikipedia to articles like "rise and fall of CORBA" should be deleted as they are a partial view. If some one wants to add to encyclopaedic content they can do so using a neutral subject. Today (2008) CORBA is an essential part of mission critical telecom networks, some of the most popular GUIs (GNOME). Distributed computing platforms like J2EE actually use CORBA (IIOP) in their core. Several IPTV projects require a core infrastructure powered by CORBA. To summarize, CORBA is the most successful distributed computing standard ever created. It powers many of today's software applications. There many not be too many changes in core CORBA (it is a mature standard now) however OMG is actively working on new specs. When you play a distributed mobile game, you may not know who powers it (like CORBA), does not mean it is not there :-) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.236.136.223 (talk) 18:12, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

If anyone is listening, please come up with a new, STL-based C++ binding, à la Internet Communications Engine. I wouldn't need backwards compatibility. Thanks. —Fleminra (talk) 18:39, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

TAO will soon have a prototype of a STL-based C++ binding 24.132.221.68 (talk) 19:14, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

I think the list of current uses, like the above with a bit more research put into it, and if available, some sort of estimation of "market share" or "market penetration" would be a good way to balance the perspective of the article while adding to the useful content.(71.233.167.118 (talk) 13:32, 9 April 2011 (UTC))

CORBA support is to be removed in Java 11 citing "There is no significant interest in developing modern applications with CORBA in Java." I'd say this is something which should be reflected in the article.

References

VMCID

Is the VMCID really important enough to deserve an article? For that matter, is it even worthwhile to merge into the CORBA article? Wikipedia isn't a comprehensive reference guide for CORBA. That's what the CORBA specs are for. -- Whpq 17:34, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this. An article (or section) on VMCID, in my opinion, doesn't have enough encyclopedic value to justify an article on Wikipedia. That sort of thing belongs in a programmer's handbook. --Tschel 22:10, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

The criticisms and success sections

The language of these sections seems more like an internet flame war than an encyclopedia entry. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 194.25.80.243 (talk) 09:56, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

I agree, these two sections are full of contradictory statements. A neutral reader will end it up wondering if CORBA was really successful or a real failure at all. Also found the section for Success lacking for not citing enough references. (SirGalahad 21:09, 4 January 2007 (UTC))

I dont think the article can argue Waldo's A note on distributed computing is biased. His paper is the seminal "limitations of dist-comp" paper and was written while Sun were wholeheartedly backing CORBA -they were one of the co-founders of the OMG, after all. Java RMI came along a lot later; Java ships with a (dated) ORB and even EJB defaults to IIOP as its protocol. Admittedly the paper applies to more than just CORBA; it applies to anything that tries to make remote stuff look local (SOAP, Java RMI, DCOM). But it is valid in Corba, because a corba OID doesnt include any location hints at all; you have to use an Orb to find things. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by SteveLoughran (talk • contribs) 12:02, 27 February 2007 (UTC).

Also, I don't know how "fundamentally false" the notion of location transparency is. I do think its impossible to make a service on a remote system appear to be something local, and not have it fail in unusual ways (e.g NFS timeouts blocking file access operations). What may be possible is for programs to be written to talk to a system that is remote, without caring where the remote system is. Perhaps "fundamentally false" should be downgraded to "impossible to maintain in the face of network failures" SteveLoughran 17:37, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

The tone needs to be made more neutral and more examples of these supposed failures/short comings are needed; otherwise the criticism is really unsubstantiated.

If you look at the source of the criticisms, its quite full of commented out opinions. That discussion should be moved to the talk pages, where it belongs. SteveLoughran 22:48, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

FYI - I altered the language to be a bit more neutral (if that's possible for me to do) however I did not add any more references, etc. Please give feedback on whether improvement or detriment... seaneparker 21:26, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Some of the language is in the past tense. This makes it sound like CORBA is no longer in use. 194.72.110.12 (talk) 11:39, 7 February 2008 (UTC)jac

Still in use, but it is not as ubiquitous as the vision. You can still find it in the Gnome desktop for Linux/Unix. SteveLoughran (talk) 18:39, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

I had a reread of the criticisms section. 1. We need to mention Microsoft and their lack of support. If all of the vendors at the time embraced CORBA, it would have stood more of a chance. As it was, MS pushed COM/DCOM. The other issue is that the criticisms says that Java RMI is the way forward. But Web Services, built on WS-*, and HTTP-based REST services have changed that. Maybe the big limitation was not the competing technologies, but the emergence of the Internet itself. CORBA was built for LAN-based distributed computing, and you now have enterprise wide and internet-scale problems, for which alternate solutions are needed. It was HTTP that stopped CORBA. SteveLoughran (talk) 18:39, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

NTCIP

I'm not sure where a link to National Transportation Communications for Intelligent Transportation System Protocol (NTCIP) would fit into this article, if anywhere. NTCIP offers CORBA as one of two possible choices for an application layer protocol. Is there a more appropriate listing for standards or other products that make use of CORBA? Squideshi 18:59, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Red Hat delivers

"(Red Hat Linux delivers with the GNOME UI system, which has its IPC built on CORBA.)"

In addition to being grammatically unsound on several levels, this sentence is difficult to understand . . . and misleading at best. Red Hat neither engineered nor is the maintainer of GTK+ ("the GNOME UI system"). I'm looking to move/modify this, but I'd like some input on what the original intent was. Was the author merely confused as to Red Hat's responsibilities and what GTK+ is? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brian Geppert (talk • contribs) 17:47, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Examples

I think a code example in one of the languages where the binding is relatively standard, e.g. Java of how CORBA is used would be helpful. Since I don't know that much about how CORBA is used, I don't actually know if that makes sense, but if it does, an example should definitely be in the article. Subwy (talk) 18:20, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

This article also needs examples of real life applications using CORBA. --Abdull (talk) 14:07, 25 August 2008 (UTC)vnvnc

Java Enterprise Edition would be the primary example AFAIK. … Al least it was, 20 years ago. :) — 109.42.178.212 (talk) 13:35, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Update on Compression paragraph?

Any update on the paragraph that ends with "the OMG meeting in September 2008 in Orlando"? trjonescp (talk) 18:40, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

This is now a formal standard, see http://www.omg.org Jwillemsen (talk) 19:15, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

DDS?

Why is DDS mentioned in the CORBA article? Data Distribution Service for Real-Time systems has nothing to do with CORBA, other than being sponsored by the same organization, OMG. DDS uses a subset of the IDL standard for convenience to define its datatypes, but even that IDL part is going away and will soon be XML based definitions. Some CORBA vendors offer DDS to expand their product line offerings, and re-use CORBA as a "shortcut" to create a DDS implementation, but that does not mean that the DDS standard has any relation to CORBA. A pure DDS implementation has zero CORBA under the hood. This confusion of DDS being associated with CORBA is common in industry, but we should help end the confusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fpbear (talk • contribs) 08:38, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

External links (re) moved

I moved the following list of external links here. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 20:18, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Specific links

• [http: //www.ciaranmchale.com/corba-explained-simply/ CORBA Explained Simply]
• [http: //www.xs4all.nl/~irmen/comp/CORBA_vs_SOAP.html Web Services/SOAP and CORBA]
• [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/corba_2.htm OMG CORBA 3]
• [http: //www.omg.org/ Object Management Group]
• [http: //www.corba.org/ Information Board]
• [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/spec_catalog.htm Catalog of OMG Specifications]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/idl2x_spec_catalog.htm IDL / Language Mapping]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/corba_spec_catalog.htm#ccm CORBA Component Model (CCM)]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/corba_spec_catalog.htm IIOP]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/corbaservices_spec_catalog.htm Services]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/corbafacilities_spec_catalog.htm Facilities]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/domain_spec_catalog.htm Domain]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/embed_intel_spec_catalog.htm Embedded Intelligence]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/omg_security.htm Security]
  • [http: //www.omg.org/technology/documents/modeling_spec_catalog.htm UML, MOF, XMI, CWM]
• [http: //cbbrowne.com/info/corba.html Description] by Christopher B. Browne
• [http: //corbaconf.kiev.ua/ CORBA support for autoconf]
• discussions
• Article "[http: //cuj.com/documents/s=7993/cujcexp1907vinoski/ XML as CORBA Data]" by Douglas C. Schmidt and Steve Vinoski
• Article "[http: //xml.sys-con.com/read/40033.htm Building Distributed Applications with Corba and XML]" by Dermot Russell and Nick Simha
• Article "[http: //www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=396 Rise and fall of CORBA]" by Michi Henning
• Response to the Rise and Fall of CORBA here "[http: //www.orbzone.org/?p=121]"

CORBA implementations

• [http: //www.puder.org/corba/matrix/ An overview of available CORBA implementations]
• [http: //www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.htm&FP=/content/products/tux BEA Tuxedo] - - A CORBA 2.5–compliant commercial ORB for Java and C++ from BEA Systems
• [http: //www.borland.com/us/products/visibroker/index.html Borland Enterprise Server, VisiBroker Ed.] - - A CORBA 2.6–compliant commercial ORB for Java and C++ from Borland.
• [http: //www.fpx.de/Combat/ Combat] - A Tcl ORB, and a Tcl layer for C++ ORBs.
• [http: //sourceforge.net/projects/fnorb Fnorb] - A CORBA 2.0 ORB for Python
• ILU - An open software object interface system from Xerox PARC.
• GNU Classpath - Contains the Free Software (GPL+linking exception, including newly written org.omg packages) implementation for Java.
• [http: //iiop-net.sourceforge.net/ IIOP.NET] - - A Free Software (LGPL) ORB for Microsoft .NET.
• [http: //www.jacorb.org/ JacORB] - - A Free Software (LGPL) ORB implemented in Java.
• [http: //j-integra.intrinsyc.com/products/espresso J-Integra Espresso] - commercial Microsoft .NET ORB by Intrinsyc J-Integra
• [http: //www.mico.org/ MICO] - - A Free Software (LGPL) ORB implemented in C++.
• [http: //omniorb.sourceforge.net/ omniORB] - - A Free Software (LGPL) ORB for C++ and Python.
• [http: //www.prismtech.com/ PrismTech's OpenFusion CORBA] - C, C++, Java, Java Real-Time, Ada CORBA solutions from hard real-time embedded to enterprise level, including CORBA services, training, consulting and industrial-grade support
• [http: //openorb.sourceforge.net/ OpenORB] - - A Free Software (BSD) ORB for Java.
• [http: //www.orbacus.com/ Orbacus] - commercial C++ and Java ORB by IONA Technologies
• [http: //www.ois.com/ ORBexpress] - standard and real-time commercial Ada, C++, and Java ORBs by Objective Interface Systems
• ORBit2 - - A Free Software (LGPL) ORB for C, C++ and Python.
• [http: //www.iona.com/products/orbix/welcome.htm Orbix] - commercial ORB by IONA Technologies
• [http: //opalorb.sourceforge.net opalORB] - - A CORBA implementation written completely in Perl.
• [http: //sf.net/projects/perlorb/ Perl ORB] - - An open-source (Artistic License) ORB implemented in Perl.
• PolyORB - - A Free Software (MGPL) ORB implemented in Ada.
• Python ORB - - A Free Software (Python license) ORB implemented in Python.
• [http: //www.sankhya.com/info/varadhi.html SANKHYA Varadhi] - - A commercial ORB for C++
• [http: //www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html TAO] - - The ACE ORB, an open-source ORB for C++
• [http: //www.taox11.org TAOX11] - - A open-source ORB for C++11
• [http: //www.martin-both.de/vborb.html VBOrb] - - A Free Software (LGPL) ORB for Visual Basic
• [http: //www.franz.com/support/documentation/5.0.1/orblink/doc/ ORBLink] - A commercial ORB for Allegro Common LISP
• [http: //clorb.sourceforge.net/ CLorb] - for Common Lisp
• [http: //www.remedy.nl/ R2CORBA] - - An open-source ORB for Ruby by Remedy IT
• [http: //www.remedy.nl/ JR2CORBA] - - An open-source ORB for JRuby by Remedy IT
• [http: //oil.luaforge.net/ OiL] - A free ORB in Lua, supports currently only part of the CORBA specification
• [http: //forge.morfeo-project.org/projects/tidorbj/ TIDorb for Java] - An open source CORBA 2.6 ORB implementation for Java Language from [http: //morfeo-project.org Morfeo Community]
• [http: //groups.google.com/group/comp.object.corba/msg/901730022f43f98f PocoCapsule for CORBA] A C++ IoC component framework for CORBA, Event, DDS, RTC, and SDR/JTRS-SCA applications.

Further comments

This doesn't fit in the Wikipedia article. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 20:19, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Timeline

Could someone with the knowledge discuss the general timeline of CORBA and it's advancements? I know Vinoski wrote a paper back in 1993.Mojodaddy (talk) 19:34, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Corba Location (CorbaLoc) section

IMO this section is not clear. What does "must support" mean in "[...]All CORBA products must support two OMG-defined URLs:[...]"? What about software whose use case doesn't involve the concept of a URL? One could just read the spec, but that defeats the purpose of mentioning it in the article. Sojourner001 (talk) 18:57, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

C++11 mapping implementation

Following sentence is lacking source of information, most notably which CORBA implementation is meant.

"By contrast, the C++11 mapping is very easy to use, as it uses Standard Template Library (STL) heavily." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:1488:AC14:1400:1AA9:5FF:FEF6:7AA9 (talk) 13:30, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Structure of this article needs some work

As of now there is a lot of detail in the Overview section. Essentially most of the article are sub sections under Overview. I think it needs to be re-structured. E.g., make some of those sub-sections top level sections and/or create additional top level section(s) with a more reasonable title than "Overview" and group the sub-sections under them. I may take a shot at that but at a minimum I wanted to document I think it needs to be done. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 16:05, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

After looking a bit more one of the things that jumps out at me is that Features could definitely be it's own major heading and I think it should be called Benefits instead. The difference is subtle but to me a feature is some technical capability that the system has. A benefit is something of value a user gets as a result of the feature. That list seems more like benefits (other things in the article are what I would consider features). I plan to change it unless anyone objects. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:57, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I made the change. Also, changed some wording. There was an unsourced claim about how "no other system provides what CORBA provides" which I just removed. IMO those kinds of claims are more appropriate for vendor marketing materials then for an encyclopedia anyway. There was also a direct link to an external site which I removed and turned into a reference. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 20:24, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Funny, but doesn't CORBA look a bit like the IPC architecture of a host operating system?

Well, yeah, which is not surprising as it was more or less abstracted from a host operating system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_%28operating_system%29

That might be worth a mention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.116.92.84 (talk) 18:42, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

So where do we stand?

What's the status of CORBA today? Are old CORBA based systems being maintained or transitioned? Are new CORBA based systems being built? If so, in what contexts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.116.92.84 (talk) 18:44, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Corba is dead as a doornail. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.225.103.2 (talk) 20:10, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Merging the Incarnation article

I'm merging the Incarnation article into this one. I'm not going to do much editing to make them fit together, I've done a little editing on the Incarnation text and I'm just going to add a new section called Incarnation after the Overview. It's not a great solution but my CORBA knowledge is kind of rusty and I would have to do more work than I have time for now to read up on it in order to really do justice to the article. But I think at least doing the merge is a step in the right direction: there were no refs on the Inception article at all and it's just a short block of text. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 18:33, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks User:MadScientistX11 ~KvnG 14:20, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Merging Servant (CORBA)

I support merging.. I may do that if I bother.. I'm not an expert on CORBA, and do not really know "Servant" in CORBA or similar context, but it seem it belongs here and not needing a separate page.. It's been a year.. Either nobody cares to much about this/that article and/or it supports CORBA as "dead".. comp.arch (talk) 16:52, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

CORBA is not "dead". I was on a mailing list just yesterday where people were talking about it quite a lot in relation to a Semantic Web project. In any case even if CORBA were "dead" it was still extremely influential in the history of IT so the articles about it should be accurate. BTW, if you don't even know what a Servant is I don't see how you can responsibly edit that part of the article without first doing some serious study on the topic. I DO know what a Servant is but I don't feel I understand it well enough to edit further without doing more research first. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 18:46, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

You are right, I'm not sure what Servant is in the CORBA context (I said I would "support merging", I would be careful if I did it myself), but it would not disallow merging to this article? Shown by "(CORBA)" in the title.. (one other thing, people wouldn't know what that is, so it's kind of disallowed while "(software)" isn't).. I'm not saying CORBA isn't notable, it is and I remember it. This article is 30,094 bytes and there is room, and the other article is very short and it has hardly been edited since 2009 and not at all since the merge proposal a year ago.. Even if CORBA isn't dead, CORBA is notable, but Servant (CORBA) on it's own? I doubt it. comp.arch (talk) 21:03, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

 Done by Nbarth ~Kvng (talk) 14:14, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Relation to JSON & co

CORBA just seems like an over-engineered enterprisey (as defined by thedailywtf.com) and painful earlier alternative to easy-to-use things like JSON.
But I came here, to look for what CORBA brings to the table in comparison…
Aside from the article ringing all the alarm bells of enterprise-speak, I could not find a mention of how it relates to such protocols.
If anyone knows, adding this would be welcome. :)
— 109.42.178.212 (talk) 13:33, 4 January 2024 (UTC)