Enterprise software

Lessons from CORBA

By Brij ⋅ June 17, 2006 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Anybody remember CORBA? It was just yesterday when this designed-by-committee acronym was the hottest thing in town. Panacea to all your integration and dynamic interface requirements. I experienced this first hand while working on Visigenics, Orbix and later on while doing a project for Active Software (later bought by Webmethods).

CORBA suffered from that slipper slope of designing solution to make everybody happy.  It never happens that way in real world.

Mich Henning is talking about the lessons from that failed initiative:

The platform had a steep learning curve and was complex and hard to use
correctly, leading to long development times and high defect rates

Simplicity wins and simple solutions carefully directed at the equilibrium points in complex chain yield better results.

WS-* is running the same risk as CORBA and specification war has made hacking difficult.  REST is making WS-* benefits appealing to lot of developers who just want to tie-in other services and not worry about the niceties of specs. Look around and see what is driving mash-up madness. CORBA didn’t pass the hackability test.