[10] WHY USE CORBA
(Part of the CORBA FAQ, Copyright © 1996)

[10.1] WHAT IS THE BASIC FUNCTIONALITY PROVIDED BY CORBA?

At the most basic level, CORBA is a standard for distributed objects. CORBA allows an application to request an operation to be performed by a distributed object and for the results of the operation to be returned back to the application making the request. The application communicates with the distributed object that is actually performing the operation. This is basic client/server functionality, where a client issues a request to a server and the server responds back to the client. Data can pass from the client to the server and is associated with a particular operation on a particular object. Data is then returned back to the client in the form of a response.

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[10.2] WHAT ADVANTAGES DOES CORBA PROVIDE?

1. CORBA supports many existing languages. CORBA also supports mixing these languages within a single distributed application.
2. CORBA supports both distribution and Object Orientation.
3. CORBA is an industry standard. This creates competition among vendors and ensures that quality implementations exist. The use of the CORBA standard also provides the developer with a certain degree of portability between implementations. Note: application source is not 100% portable between different CORBA products.
4. CORBA provides a high degree of interoperability. This insures that distributed objects built on top of different CORBA products can communicate. Large companies do not need to mandate a single CORBA product for all development.
5. Over 600 companies back CORBA, including hardware companies, software companies, and cable companies, phone companies, banks, etc.

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[10.3] WHAT OTHER TYPES OF DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS DOES CORBA COMPETE WITH?

• DCE [under construction]
• DCOM
• RPC (remote procedure calls)
• Shared memory based interaction
• Named Pipe communication
• Socket level programming
• Message Queuing
• Other IPC (inter-process communication) mechanisms
• Database tables, triggers and polling

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