The Rise and Fall of CORBA

In the early '90s, persuading programs on different machines to talk to each other was a nightmare, especially if different hardware, operating systems, and programming languages were involved: programmers either used sockets and wrote an entire protocol stack themselves or their programs didn't talk at all. (Other early middleware, such as Sun ONC, Apollo NCS, and DCE, was tied to C and Unix and not suitable for heterogeneous environments.)

After a false start with CORBA 1.0, which was not interoperable and provided only a C mapping, the OMG (Object Management Group) published CORBA 2.0 in 1997. It provided a standardized protocol and a C++ language mapping, with a Java language mapping following in 1998. This gave developers a tool that allowed them to build heterogeneous distributed applications with relative ease. CORBA rapidly gained popularity and quite a number of mission-critical applications were built with the technology. CORBA's future looked rosy indeed.

During CORBA's growth phase in the mid- and late '90s, major changes affected the computing landscape, most notably, the advent of Java and the Web. CORBA provided a Java language mapping, but it did nothing to cooperate with the rapidly exploding Web. Instead of waiting for CORBA to deliver a solution, companies turned to other technologies and started building their e-commerce infrastructures based on Web browsers, HTTP, Java, and EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans).