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September 14, 1998


Corba Takes Off

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Need for component-based interoperability drives middleware's surge in popularity

By Alan Radding

Illustration by Matt Foster The Corba standard is winning acceptance in a broad range of industries, from financial services and manufacturing to transportation and defense sectors. And the driving force behind its new-found popularity is Java.

Corba is especially popular in the financial industry, says James Chong, VP of architecture at brokerage Charles Schwab & Co. These firms are crafting cutting-edge Java applications in highly distributed environments, and Corba (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is letting them create standard communication mechanisms between applications and components.

A growing number of business developers are also turning to Corba object middleware to bring enterprise scalability to their Java applications.

Pratt & Whitney, a manufacturer of jet engines, adopted Corba to simplify application interoperability across the enterprise and increase programmer productivity, says Bob Landgraff, a computer specialist with this United Technologies Corp. subsidiary. By using Iona Technologies Inc.'s Orbix Corba software, P&W developers can use the same linking mechanism in every application, rather than write a unique remote procedure call for each application.

Even Microsoft, a reluctant member of the Object Management Group, the consortium responsible for Corba development, has grudgingly accepted this industry standard. Microsoft recently made a number of partnerships and licensing agreements to ensure interoperability between its proprietary Component Object Model and Corba.

Corba's sudden popularity is driven by businesses' need to build cross-platform, component-based applications that can be deployed over the World Wide Web. After a painfully slow evolution, Corba finally appears ready for production business environments.

Corba is component middleware that lets technical objects and business components find each other in a network environment and invoke their respective services regardless of the underlying platforms or languages on which the applications are running. Corba goes beyond the functions of a simple object request broker. It specifies a set of services that will let organizations build, modify, share, and manage distributed components.

With the Internet Inter-ORB protocol, which is part of the Corba standard, Corba finally delivers a distributed, enterprise communication backbone and en-sures interoperability among ORBs. IIOP is the communications language supported in both Corba and Java. IIOP runs on top of a TCP/IP transport mechanism.

A recent survey of 200 businesses by the Cutter Consortium market research firm found that Corba is the preferred object middleware by a margin of 2-to-1 over Microsoft's Windows-based COM. Of the Corba users, 61% were happy with the technology while 18% were still evaluating it. Overall, 70% reported having at least one major distributed object application while 41% reported at least one failed initiative.

Pratt & Whitney's Government Engines and Space Propulsion group in West Palm Beach, Fla., turned to Iona's commercial implementation of Corba instead of writing custom code. RPCs are custom, low-level calls that must be created new for each situation, Landgraff says. By using Corba, developers simply make standard, high-level calls to the Corba interface, while the low-level communications code is automatically generated by the Orbix tool.

P&W developers tried to write communications code without Corba. By the time they wrote the timing and error-handling routines, and other communications and linking functions, "we had a mountain of C++ code," Landgraff says. "We finally gave up." Corba provided a much more lightweight approach to application integration.

One of P&W's Corba applications handles the scheduling, planning, and control functions of all the group's engine design and manufacturing. Rather than build new functions, the developers wrapped a legacy application, turning it into a reusable Corba component. Developers simply call for the service provided by the component by name. The ORB identifies the requested component, forwards the request while making any required translations, and returns the results. Additional reports and extensions are developed as Corba objects.

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Illustration by Matt Foster


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