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.NET or CORBA?

Posted by Cliff on from the which-way-would-you-go dept.

DavidTurner queries: "My company is developing software to integrate various hardware systems and present a unified interface, plus system-level interaction. Essentially, an object hierarchy plus supporting services - clients, servers and drivers. We wish to replace our proprietary protocol with a standardized distributed object system. The choice has boiled down to .NET versus CORBA+GTK. We want interface contracts, OpenGL support, and embeddable forms (widgets). We also want rapid development. Which would you choose? Has anyone actually field-tested the relative merits of the two paths?"

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Cocoa + Distributed Objects by RevAaron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    DISCLAIMER: You may not be interested in this combo because of a prejudice or (more likely) an existing hardware investment.

    Mac OS X + Cocoa may be an option worth exploring. Users of the Objective-C language and the Cocoa libraries find it quite excellent. I'm primarily a Smalltalk programmer, used to the very supportive development environment and mature and full-featured library provided by it... Which generally makes me hard to impress. However, in a couple dives into OS X application development, I have to say that it is a very nice setup.

    Part of the default Cocoa libraries is a pretty mature Distributed Object framework.

    Then again, for something as simple as distributed objects and a UI, I have everything that I need to do that already in Squeak. I can use protocols like XML-RPC or SOAP in this setting, or a faster protocol that is more specific to Smalltalk. :)

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  2. Our similar dilema and what we ended up with... by maunleon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We had to choose between .NET and J2EE. We ended up with .NET. The decision was purely financial. When we put down on paper how much it would cost in software purchase in order for us to equip our team and deploy our solution, it turned out that we already had everything we needed for .NET

    Java enterprise development did not look cheap at all.

    Of course, you may be starting from a different point. We already had VS.NET licenses, fully licenses MS servers, etc.

    As for Corba vs. .NET, I believe .NET is a more elegant solution. That is just my opinion.
    Corba programmers are hard to come by, and .NET is still new. However, anyone who understands the concept of an enterprise app should pick up .NET easy. I believe CORBA is much harder to pick up for a programmer being introduced into a development team.

    1. Re:Our similar dilema and what we ended up with... by farnsworth · · Score: 4, Interesting
      We had to choose between .NET and J2EE. We ended up with .NET. The decision was purely financial.

      cost of ide (eclipse/emacs) $0

      cost of servlet container (tomcat) $0

      cost of ejb container (jboss) $0

      cost of compiler, built tools, version management (javac, ant, cvs/subversion) $0

      I'm curious how you evaluated .net to be cheaper than this. really, I am. what did you need to do that's not supported by these tools?

      --

      There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.