Java and CORBA - a smooth blend

CORBA, for those who haven't heard of it before, stands for Common Object Request Broker Architecture. This architecture allows clients to invoke methods of objects running on remote servers. The idea is nothing new - many developers will have come across similar systems such as RPC (remote procedure call), or Java's own RMI (remote method invocation). The difference between these and CORBA is that CORBA is much more interoperable with other platforms - a C++ object running on a Wintel system can communicate with a Java object on a Unix box. Developers don't need to know what language a CORBA service is written in, or even where it is physically located. This makes CORBA systems very versatile - one can change the location of a CORBA object, and then re-register with a nameserver. Clients that look up the service can then find its new location, and then continue to make requests. Java makes it easy to integrate support for CORBA into applications and applets, thanks to the introduction of Java IDL in JDK1.2