Is CORBA legacy?

Question

For a distributed computing project starting today, with 0 legacy components, are there any good reasons to look into CORBA?

Answer 1

There are still situations where CORBA could be a good answer:

• when you are building a distributed system involving multiple programming languages and multiple platforms,
• when your system entails sending complex data structures ... and SOAP doesn't cut it,
• when you have high rates of messaging ... and HTTP doesn't cut it, or
• when you have to interact with existing CORBA clients and/or services.

But having said that, there are alternatives that do what CORBA does, only better ... or so they claim. For example ZeroC's ICE

EDIT @fnieto chimes in to say (or imply) that ICE is not free, but TAO is.

This is inaccurate and misleading.

1. ICE is GPL'ed software, and is available for free download. You only needed to pay for ICE if you / your company are not prepared to live with the terms of the GPL. (Or if you need support.)
2. I used ICE as an example of an alternative to CORBA. TAO is CORBA. The ICE authors make a credible case as to why they can get better performance by not being CORBA compliant.
3. TAO is by no means the only free / open-source CORBA implementation. I can think of 3 others, off the top of my head.

The down-side of ICE is lack of interoperability with CORBA middleware stacks, but in my experience interoperability of different CORBA implementations could also be problematic. (Things may have improved in that area ... but I haven't done any CORBA work since ~2002, so I'm a bit out of touch.)

Answer 2

From the existing answers, this gets into almost a religious topic. One can look at CORBA the same way as the half-empty/half-full glass: on one hand, CORBA is dated legacy cruft, and on the other hand it's relatively stable with several implementations available and the "devil you know".

In my line of work, I see CORBA deployed in embedded systems, real-time systems (CORBA has RT extensions), and the like. There aren't many alternatives AFAIK.

Another "advantage" of CORBA is the availability of several high-quality open source implementations, e.g., TAO, MICO, JacORB, etc., with differing licensing and support models. There are also still commercial editions available.

With regard to "most" CORBA apps being implemented in Java--that's not the case in my experience. While the language mapping for CORBA to Java is one of the nicest there is (which may not be saying much), Java already has a very nice distributed computing model that offers richness beyond CORBA, and all-Java apps use that more than CORBA. The vast majority of CORBA development I've seen is in C++ (which is also the worst language mapping).

Finally, CORBA offers standardized asynchronous client-side invocations in the form of AMI, but never offered asynchronous handling on the server side. TAO offers a non-standard server-side implementation called AMH.