[omniORB] CORBA versus Sockets

[Sander Steffann]

Hi,

> All packets are encoded in XML.  So the advantages of IDL go away.
> Socket are available for most platforms / software development tools.
> So no extra points for CORBA here either.  And we do not need any
> failover type features.
>
> In our environment there will be a single server written in C# running
> on MS Windows XP.  However, there are multiple clients (written in C#
> and Python) all connecting to the same server.  The server and the
> clients sometimes run on the same PC and other times on different PCs.
>
> The problem is that people know and are comfortable with sockets.  Given
> the above, are there still good arguments to be made in favor of CORBA?

Given that all your data structures are XML text, I don't think that CORBA 
will be a lot of help for you. The things you will have to do yourself if 
you use sockets are:
- Server thread management
- Connection management
- Exception/error signaling (but you probably do this in XML already)

It's probably easier to solve these issues with sockets than to educate the 
developers about CORBA.

I personally like to use CORBA because of the strict interface definitions 
in IDL, and because of the flexibility (combining different platforms and 
languages). If you don't specify the interface in IDL but put everything in 
XML (which can also be used across platforms/languages), then I don't see 
the point anymore.

- Sander