.NET or CORBA?

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?"

Comments

Cocoa + Distributed Objects

[RevAaron]

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. :)

Re:Our similar dilema and what we ended up with...

[farnsworth]

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?