Corba Fundamentals   «Prev  Next»
Lesson 8 Why implement CORBA?
Objective Advantages of employing CORBA

Advantages of using CORBA

What are the advantages of employing CORBA?
When deciding on whether to employ a CORBA solution, developers should consider the following tangible advantages of CORBA.
The existing computing infrastructure is already quite diverse in most organizations. Therefore, this infrastructure is difficult to manage and use as a target for new software solutions. When you also consider that organizations are beginning to transact business over the Internet, interoperability becomes a primary requirement. In addition to this structurally diverse and interconnected environment, today's business applications are very complex. One of the best tools to deal with this complexity is object-oriented development.

What does CORBA offer?

CORBA's key benefits are:
  1. Hardware interoperability
  2. Distributed computing
  3. Development language interoperability
  4. Object-oriented development
  5. Application interoperability and reuse
  6. A pre-defined basic architecture
  7. Access to CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities

What does OMG offer?

The OMG's key benefits are:
  1. Wide software developer support
  2. An open standard that strives for interoperability[1] at all levels
  3. An open, democratic process for defining standards
  4. No focus on operating system support and no platform agendas
One of the big questions for developers is the level of industry support. A growing number of vendors have committed to supporting CORBA in their future products.

Who are the vendors that support Corba?

Specifications published by the OMG are free of charge. Vendors of CORBA technology do not pay a royalty to the OMG. Specifications are developed by consensus of interested submitters.
A number of vendors have committed to support the CORBA specification in their products. The list includes:
  1. Baan
  2. BEA
  3. Forte
  4. GemStone
  5. Hewlett-Packard
  6. Hitachi
  7. Hummingbird
  8. IBM
  9. Inprise
  10. INTERSOLV
  11. IONA
  12. JavaSoft
  13. Lotus
  14. NEC
  15. NetDynamics
  16. Netscape
  17. Novell
  18. Oracle
  19. Silicon Graphics
  20. Sun
  21. Sybase
  22. Symantec
  23. Toshiba

[1]interoperability: The concept of classes automatically containing the variables and methods defined in their supertypes.