CORBA

• CORBA stands for Common Object Request Broker Architecture.
• It is a type of middleware, client-server software development model.
• CORBA is an open standard for distributed objects.
• In this application directly communicates with the distributed object that is actually performing the operations.
• CORBA provides various important benefits like wide platform and language support, open standard, industry-standard, scalability, maturity, efficiency, and many more.

Open Standard -

• As a CORBA is an open standard therefore users can choose an implementation from a variety of CORBA vendors or any of the freeware implementations.
• This also increases the high degree of interpretability among CORBA-based applications.

Industry Standard -

• CORBA supports both distribution, portability between implementations, and Object Orientation.
• This creates competition among vendors and ensures that quality implementations exist.

Wide Platform Support -

• CORBA implementations are available for a wide variety of computers, including IBM OS/390 and Fujitsu Global Server mainframes.
• Numerous variants of UNIX (including Linux), Windows, AS/400, Open VMS, Apple’s OS X, and several embedded operating systems also support CORBA.

Wide Language Support -

• CORBA supports many existing languages.
• CORBA also supports mixing these languages within a single distributed application.
• Like C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Ada, COBOL, PL/I, LISP, Python and IDLScript.

Maturity -

• CORBA is extremely feature-rich, supporting many programming languages, operating systems, and a diverse range of capabilities.
• Like transactions, security, naming, trading services, messaging, and publish-subscribe services that are essential for many enterprise-level applications.

Scalability -

• The flexible, server-side infrastructure of CORBA makes it feasible to develop servers that can scale from handling a small number of objects up to handle a virtually unlimited number of objects.
• The real-world projects have demonstrated with a CORBA server can scale to handle not just a huge amount of server-side data, but also high communication loads from thousands of client applications.

Efficiency -

• The on-the-wire protocol infrastructure of CORBA guarantees that messages between clients and servers are transmitted in a compact representation.
• Most CORBA implementations marshal data (that is, convert data from programming-language types into a binary buffer that can be transmitted) efficiently.

Multi-Disciplinary Nature -

• CORBA is used everywhere from billing systems to multi-media news delivery to airport runway illumination, aircraft radio control, and the Hubble space telescope.
• Most of the world’s telephone systems, as well as the truly mission-critical systems operated by the world’s biggest banks, are built on CORBA.
• In short, CORBA is being used successfully in many industries, including aerospace, consulting, education, e-commerce, finance, government, health-care, human resources, insurance, ISVs, manufacturing, military, petrochemical, publishing, real estate, research, retail, telecommunications, and utilities.