Re: is it safe do adopt CORBA?

[Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>]

marcelo.batera@gmail.com wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> 	I'm diving into the development of a generic framework for build
> business applications in Ada. I know there are thousands of system
> like that in other languages and I've actually worked with one of
> these tools (OFBiz.org) for over one year and a half. But those
> systems tend to be slow and performance is one of our highest
> requirements.
> 
> 	We are going to build a BI application with this framework for a big
> company (and this application might become a complete ERP solution in
> the future), so we need the system to be efficient. It's also going to
> be a distributed application due to the internal organization of the
> company's departments and their own IT systems.
> 
>   For this reason we are tending to go for CORBA but all the articles
> I found on the web about it have made us worry about this decision.
> 
>   Some of those articles even say CORBA is dead and claims SOAP is a
> better replacement, sometimes giving some techinical "advantages" of
> SOAP over CORBA. Not only those supposed advantages seemed
> questionable but they wouldn't be reason enough for us to run away
> from this middleware. Also, we need efficiency (something SOAP doesn't
> give us) and the possibility to interact with other languages (such as
> Java) over the network (something annex e doesn't provide us) and even
> the integration with the user's desktop (gnome uses intensively CORBA
> in it's very core) is very tempting.
> 
>   But still there is this hype about CORBA being dead and that's
> something that really worry us. What's your oppinion about this? Is
> there other middleware that I haven't noticed we could use that's
> better suited for this kind of application?
> 
>   I'm asking this in this list because our main language is going to
> be Ada.
> 

The truth of course is that it is not safe to pick anything as anything 
you pick will be 'dead' by the time you finish..at least in some 
people's eyes. CORBA was 'dead' and slow by many measures not long after 
it came out but that has not stopped many people from being successful 
with it.

I don't really know that much about your application domain and how 
these distributed applications will interact but perhaps you should look 
at building something with WSDL (supported by AWS - (Ada Web server)).

In the end, you have to pick something generally solid, then believe it 
in it and go forward without worrying too much that you picked the 
'wrong' tool (unless it is just broken and does not meet your needs).


for fun try googling for
soap is dead
corba is dead
xml is dead
DCOM is dead
.NET is dead

and when you are done with the noun is dead game, try
noun considered harmful.


Ahh..the fun of the web an pundits...


Of course none of this takes away the fact that it is good to do the 
kind of initial research you are doing...