How good is CORBA?

[Nigel Rantor]

Sai Krishna M wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> i have been developing web based applications using python+cheetah.
> 
> The numbers are increasing. The applications have many common parts of
> code. Though these applications are separate from each other they are
> run in the same server.
> 
> I heard about CORBA... but also heard that it has some flaws...like
> the programming being very complicated.
> Also heard that CORBA is no more used these days...
> 
> Can someone suggest me a better option or is corba fine?

This is an extremely loaded question and you're liable to get many 
differing opinions.

What follows is just my opinion, I don't want to get into any religious 
wars.

CORBA is a large, complex system that allows you to do object-RPC 
efficiently and in many different languages.

Web services are now converging on the same solutions as the OMG did 
with CORBA because they are solving the same problems.

If you need to access someone else's services then web services with 
XML-RPC/SOAP/REST is probably a great idea.

If you have any kind of need for performance, or if all of your 
interfaces are internal then I would choose CORBA.

I am currently building a system with a mixture of CORBA/SOAP interfaces 
because of these trade-offs.

If you don't like CORBA, but want to do efficient object-RPC and don't 
mind paying for it then perhaps look at Ice from www.zeroc.com, they're 
a bunch of good guys who were big CORBA people and decided to go make an 
object-RPC mechanism without the cruft that CORBA gathered.

Despite the fact that some very bad decisions were made about what to 
include in CORBA you don't *have* to use any of the braindead features.

If you have any more specific questions then let me know, this is just 
my quick 0.02c

Regards,

   n