Microsoft Proposes "Open" Replacement for CORBA

Alex T-B writes "Looks like Microsoft is taking the threat from CORBA and Java seriously. They've launched a network protocol suite [C-Net story] to embrace and extend the distributed business software market. SOAP, as it's called, is based on XML, and is supposed to move audiences away from UNIX and towards adopting Win2k and fully MS-ized software solutions. Interestingly, no MS software is needed to use SOAP, and it levels the playing field as 'proprietary' solutions can be replaced with a universal standard that enabled apps written in different languages to communicate with each other easily over the internet. Is MS actually doing the market a favour by removing vendors' 'lock-in' strategies to properietary solutions?"

Comments

How "open" do you want it?

[Arrowhead]

First: the title of this /. item is misleading:
CORBA is already open.

I've written my own CORBA implementation in perl using only the freely available documentation from the OMG (see COPE).

Second: about XML and remote procedure/method calls.

From the MS SOAP specification it looks like the scope of SOAP is far more limited than that of CORBA. The same can be said of Dave Winer's XML RPC (I forgot the exact name).
The difference is that the XML-based specifications only tell you how to make a method call. What they don't tell you are things like

• How to address objects (how do you find them, how does the server keep them apart, do they all have to live in a web server?)
• How to write contracts that ensure that client and server speak on the same terms. XML is very flexible, it's easy to add a new field to your structure. But if you write your high performance server in C++ then it will need a recompile with some added code to make sense of that added field.
  CORBA uses IDL to write the contracts. Or you can use an Interface Repository.
• How to write clients and servers portably. Does everyone take their favourite XML library and start hacking, or will there be a standard way to map the SOAP datatypes to native datatypes for all the programming languages people might use?

The embrace-and-extend angle.
I noticed that MS felt the need to implement a new HTTP method called M-POST. So even though from a distance everything looks standard (XML, HTTP), a closer look reveals thta for best results people should use web servers, client libraries, proxy-servers and firewalls that are all taught to properly handle M-POST.

Conclusion
It might actually make sense to use SOAP as a new transport mechanism with CORBA. Coders would get to keep their language bindings and their existing code base, and CORBA would get a more or less standard way to travel over HTTP (which is the whole point of the SOAP excercise. HTTP means that every firewall will understand it)