Tim and Michi

Hi Don,

actually, standardizing the language mapping is a good idea, IMO. It gives me source-code portability, without which, I'd be at the mercy of each vendor's tool kit. I agree that the CORBA C++ mapping sucks. But that isn't in the nature of the beast. Ice amply demonstrates that -- its C++ mapping really flies. Easy, intuitive, no complexity, no leaks, and integrated with STL. So, there is nothing wrong with standardizing language mappings, but there is everything wrong with standardizing on a poor language mapping that is created without prior experience.

I think this really underscores the comments I made in Tim's blog: it takes us a few goes to get things right.

I agree with your comment on security also: not having security in something such as CORBA is almost the same as issuing the death certificate before the birth certificate...

Cheers,

Michi.

One key early failing of CORBA was (IMO) it's lack of focus on interop; there may have been a standard API, but with a choice of Apollo or Sun wire formats from the outset meant you were doomed for interop.

The other is the language binding. The Corba bindings suffer from their age. I think DOM has the same flaw, and even COM IDL generates "legacy" C++ code, last time I looked. Maybe the issue is that languages aren't designed with the needs of high-longevity distributed systems in mind, and all attempts to make remote systems look like local objects are ultimately doomed. I think Erlang does it the best; its almost enough to make we want to use Corba again. But then I'd have to learn Erlang properly.

The *main* problem with CORBA was that you guys (MS that is) never bought in -- and obviously not because of technical reasons, but rather motivated by politics. Maybe MS has changed enough so that (in theory) things would be different in a similar situation now ...

BTW, while it's extremely cool that you have comments now the fact that all of the text is underlined is extremely annoying.

Over in his new blog, Don comments on what he thinks CORBA got wrong. This might surprise you, but I wholly agree with him, and in fact I would state some of what he said even more strongly. Now, don't get me wrong -- I haven't turned into some sort of CORBA turncoat or traitor, spewing FUD about it like there's no tomorrow (like one guy I know). There is simply no denying that CORBA has succeeded wildly and remains a viable solution for problems requiring high-performance and flexible custom integration, nor is there any use in denying that the distributed computing world has advanced considerably due to CORBA. Rather, I think it's just generally useful to fairly and objectively analyze and criticize technologies so we can learn and improve. Specifically, I agree with Don about the programming model issue. We CORBA types have been saying for years that there's...

I found Ted Neward's post on WS and Corba quite interesting. I tend to agree with most of what's being...