CORBA

CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) for enabling interoperable, distributed object communication. It specifies how objects located in different processes and on different machines can invoke methods on each other as if they were local, using an intermediary called an Object Request Broker (ORB).

Core concepts in CORBA include the Interface Definition Language (IDL) for language-neutral interface specification, the Portable Object Adapter (POA) for mapping objects to implementations, and protocols such as the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) for communication over TCP/IP. Clients obtain references to remote objects and use stubs to invoke methods, while servers implement the objects and expose them through the appropriate adapters and skeletons.

In addition to core messaging, CORBA provides services and facilities, including the Naming Service, Trading Service, Lifecycle Service, and Event Service, as well as security and transaction-related features. Dynamic invocation interfaces (DII) and dynamic skeletons (DSI) allow adaptable, run-time method invocation without static stubs, enhancing flexibility in heterogeneous environments.

History and usage have shown that CORBA emerged in the 1990s and evolved through CORBA 2.x and 3.x releases. IIOP provided cross-language, cross-vendor interoperability and facilitated wide adoption across enterprise middleware, financial, and telecommunications domains. However, the standard’s complexity and performance overhead contributed to a gradual shift toward alternative architectures.

Security considerations are addressed by the CORBA Security Service, covering authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and access control. Today, CORBA remains in use in some legacy and large-scale systems, but many organizations have migrated toward web services, RESTful APIs, and newer RPC frameworks.