The Rise and Fall of CORBA
ACM Queue has an interesting article by Michi Henning, The Rise and Fall of CORBA (there's a lot we can learn from CORBA's mistakes.) CORBA was very big at DSTC when I was at the University of Queensland, to which it was attached. (Heh, my fingers always want to write 'distcc' rather than 'dstc' — in fact they just did it again.)
I once used their CORBA Notification package, which seemed like a bit of an abstraction inversion: asynchronous publish & subscribe notifications built on top of synchronous rpc built on top of streamed sockets.
A democratic process such as the OMG's is uniquely ill-suited for creating good software. Despite the known procedural problems, however, the industry prefers to rely on large consortia to produce technology. Web services, the current silver bullet of middleware, uses a process much like the OMG's and, by many accounts, also suffers from infighting, fragmentation, lack of architectural coherence, design by committee, and feature bloat. It seems inevitable that Web services will enact a history quite similar to CORBA's.
His new project, Ice, looks pretty interesting.
posted Wed 5 Jul 2006 in /software | link
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