More Nonce About CORBA

[uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com]

Thomas B. Passin <tpassin at idsonline.com>:

> XML (and, say, XML-RPC) is much lighter-weight than CORBA and easier to get
> going.  There are (I imagine) many, many applications that don't need all
> the CORBA machinery.  Java RMI supposes Java, but how about something for
> non-Java people?

What?  I don't mean to sound nasty, but every few months in this forum there 
is a thread on CORBA vs XML/HTTP and there are inevitable quotes that CORBA is 
"hard to get into" or "heavyweight" or whatever, and it makes me wonder 
whether those speaking have looked at CORBA.

CORBA is much like XML, folks.  It can be as easy to "get into" as 

<tag>you're it</tag>

or as abstruse as W3C schemata or XPath.  It can be as lightweight as SAX or 
as heavyweight as fully-implemented DOM.

And practically, having trained people in distributed programming, I hardly 
agree that XML+HTTP is easier for beginners than CORBA.  CORBA can be used 
with almost complete transparency from most languages, wheras XML/HTTP 
requires a frightening knowledge of formats and libraries.  Maybe XML-RPC is 
easy from UserLand's tools, but I prefer Python, and I know that CORBA for 
Python is much easier than XML-RPC.  My second preference is C++ and I can say 
the same in that case.  Luckily, I'm not crazy for Java, since its CORBA 
binding is an almighty nightmare.  Come to think of it, maybe that's why there 
are so many misocorbists about: there are a lot of Java-heads hereabouts and 
they prolly caught sight of the Java binding...

So to those who think that CORBA is hard, I invite them to actually try the 
simple echo server used as example in so many packages (about ten lines of 
Python code on either the client or server side).  To those who think it's 
heavyweight, I encourage them to test the performance of TAO or ORBit.

-- 
Uche Ogbuji
FourThought LLC, IT Consultants
uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com	(970)481-0805
Software engineering, project management, Intranets and Extranets
http://FourThought.com		http://OpenTechnology.org



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