The long-sought ability to run applications on different servers in far-flung places over the Internet without an army of high-end developers came a step closer recently as the Object Management Group (OMG) adopted the CORBA Component Model.
The last of a slew of esoteric technologies that comprise CORBA 3, the Component Model has implications far greater than its acronym-strewn lineage would indicate.
The model, expected to be officially adopted by the OMG board in December, will make it easier for a broader group of developers to take advantage of the complex CORBA interoperability services.
Once tool makers and ORB (object request broker) vendors support the emerging component model this fall — and a bevy of them already have — writing applications that can run on legacy systems and the parade of new, emerging Enterprise JavaBean-compliant application servers will be some 80 per cent automated, said officials at OMG.
C++, C, Cobol, Java, Ada, Smalltalk and ActiveX — all these languages and their components will be more deeply integrated via the CORBA Component Model.
The model also holds promise as an enabler of the latest acronym buzzword — enterprise application integration (EAI).
“It helps to bring the old and the new together,” said Ralph Galantine, a senior product manager for CORBA at Sun Microsystems Inc.’s JavaSoftware division, in Cupertino, Calif. “This is important because it makes distributed programming easier.”
The latest CORBA development helps jibe the old with the new because CORBA is already supported by many legacy systems. The tight Java alignment now offers entr