CORBA and Open Source

by

Dare Obasanjo

• CORBA is hard.Due to the fact that the CORBA specification does not require ORBs to provide services that are integral to most distributed applications such as transactional support, security, a naming service, event handling, and object persistentce, the onus is often on the developer to provide these services for his or her application. As the KDE developers recently found out, being talented at hacking C is not enough to prepare one for the myriad complexities that encompass distributed computing. Fortunately with the advent of GNOME's Bonobo and the Corba Component Model, perhaps this will become a thing of the past.
  
  
• Components lead to too many interdependencies. Some people point to DLL hell on Windows machines as well as the growing amount of interdependencies amongst GNOME libraries as a reason to be wary of using components. Both GNOME and Microsoft have made strives in designing their component architectures and versioning systems to avoid the mistakes of yester-year. Of course, this does not mean that multiple interrelationships do not exist between software components but instead that with proper design a lot of problems related to interdependencies can be solved. Admittedly more than a few people have mentioned that the interdependencies in the GNOME libraries are rather excessive.
  
  
• CORBA is a buzzword just like XML. This mentality is the most difficult to understand but is rather common in the Open Source world. All I can say to counter this is that although some technologies may have been hyped it doesn't change the fact they are useful. This includes Java, CORBA and XML.
  
  
• Distributed Computing not Taught in Schools. Even though a majority of college programs teach C and operating system internals, the same cannot be said for distributed computing. This may explain why there are many people hacking away at the Linux kernel and writing various Linux applications using C but very few are writing any applications that use CORBA.
  
  
• No Open Source CORBA Orbs. A lot of people are under the impression that all ORBs are proprietary and expensive but this is far from the truth and in fact there are several Open Source CORBA ORBs including TAO, MICO, Jonathan,JacORB,and ORBacus
  
  

Are my reasons correct and does anyone think anything can be done to reverse the current trend in Open Source software to shy away from CORBA and other distributed/compnent technologies?