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The Rise and Fall of Corba
ChelleChelle writes "Chief scientist of ZeroC, Michi Henning, has an interesting look at the story behind CORBA a once-promising distributed computing technology. Henning provides more than a brief history, in addition to several reasons pinpointing why CORBA fell short, focusing specifically on the OMG's technology adoption process itself. Most interesting is the final discussion on what we can learn from CORBA's decline, particularly in reference to web services."
CORBA might have been a great messaging infrastructure and all, but any corba websites I saw were confusing, over-diagrammed, impenetrably academic documents. Seriously, could you dumb it down a shade? Spare me your medical mumbo jumbo? Hello world apps?
CORBA is too complex, an overengineered attempt at creating a clockwork the size of Tokyo whereas a single wristwatch would have sufficed.
Yes, I have had to use it, unfortunately.
The OMG people are clever bunch, but why do they insist on making these superheavy monolithical monsters? Why not build interoperable but smaller things which you can grok immediately, almost via intuition?
Like you yourself put it indirectly via examples, developers like to develop systems which have the best supporting tools, systems which are the most intuitive and easiest to understand, systems which do not fight back when you try to do something, systems for which development is not an exercise in sado-masochism. So there's a design paradigm for you: make the APIs dead simple to use, and they will be used, a lot.
Nobody wants to hack around some big behemoth. It's about job ergonomics, really. If a chair doesn't feel right for your body, you don't sit in it.
CORBA always required holes in firewall, more complicated to setup(as mentioned in article), poor/no load balancing/fault tolerance mechanism/ maintainability(probably this was not meant to be there, but very important for an ecommerce setup), poor QoS (this improved in CORBA 3.0 after Douglas Schmidt's and others contribution), security (though iiop over ssl appeared sometime later, security mechanisms for ecommerce were missing, that could bring collaboration from unknown consumers/providers.)
SOAP/xmlrpc address some of these issues nicely, and might become defacto tools for business to business integration. I had only one issue with it. The protocol is too verbose.
My 2 cents.
hilarious
The problem with CORBA was mostly the technicalities and 'grossness' of the design. Yes I used the Java bindings, and it was just crap. All these "helper" objects and peers and stubs and junk. You'd compile an IDL, which was some hacked up C++ interface which wasn't even C++, get a buttload of Java classes that did not act anything like any other Java object on the planet. Lots of 'icky' exceptions. It just, for lack of a better way to describe it, had no style.
Try to teach CORBA to some normal programmer and they'll be thinking that creating their own wire protocol is probably going to be easier for 99% of the things they need to do. Seriously, you just don't look at CORBA bindings (for Java at least) and want to have anything to do with it. It's probably not so bad for C++ developers because they are used to a lot of noise and complexity, and they have templates and stuff to 'spray perfume' on CORBA and make it smell... better.
But seriously, when your technology drains the life out of any competent developer who actually likes to program then you know something is very wrong.