[omniORB] Shopping for CORBA ORB and reencounter with The Mystery

[Sai-Lai Lo]

Zach,

I think we should be happy to see not one but several free CORBA
implementations currently being actively developed. It seems to me there is
no better way to improve quality than a healthy competition. 

CORBA is an open standard but for various reasons does not have a reference
implementation. If it is left to the commercial vendors, a cynical me would
say that they have no interest in ensuring that their products are
compliant. Surely they would pay  lip service to conformance etc but the
fact is that in today's CORBA market, the ORBs that have most difficulty in
interoperating with other ORBs are the ones with the larger market
shares. You are free to draw you own conclusions but again the cynical me
would say it is to their interests not to be 100% compliant (and hence being
able to interoperate) in order to achieve customer lock-in.

I believe the single most important reason for AT&T to use CORBA is that it
is an open standard. The use of standard-based products holds the promise
that AT&T will not be locked into a particular vendor's product. But unless
the "standard-based" products are indeed conform to the standard, this is
just pipe dream. I believe omniORB and other free ORBs have an important
role to play in that they collectively provide the physical embodiment of a
paper specification. All the free ORBs (I hope) share the same desire to
produce an implementation that conforms to the standard to the letter. The
fact that they are independently developed help to ensure that any
deviation from the specification will be spotted and corrected when
applications developed on top of these free ORBs interoperate. 

As for the reasons of choosing omniORB among the various alternatives, I
think if you are looking for an ORB that you can depend on, omniORB is the
right choice. Most of us that have been involved in the omniORB development
have been doing middleware and distributed system hacking since the days
when we were post-grad students. However, the work was not started as a
personal hobby or a middleware research project. It was done because we
need a 100% dependable platform to write highly distributed applications.
Today, as we look at the system built by our colleagues using omniORB
magically tracks small ultrasonic tags in the corridors and offices of our
building to within a 5cm accuracy and is able to do all sorts of magic like
location aware applications, we are quietly confident that omniORB is able
to put up with a lot of load and various complex application scenerios.

There is however one reason why omniORB is not the right choice. If you are
looking for a long feature list and counting the number of CORBA services
available, omniORB is not for you. I have my doubts about the necessity of
some of the latest "features" and the usefulness of the services that are
either underspecified or over the top in complexity. But this is another
topic and better be left for another time.


Regards,

Sai-Lai


-- 
Sai-Lai Lo                                   S.Lo@uk.research.att.com
AT&T Laboratories Cambridge           WWW:   http://www.uk.research.att.com 
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