I was somewhat involved with CORBA in its early days. It had some very smart people driving it. It was derived from work already being done by the large companies like IBM, DEC, Apollo, Sun, HP, and Microsoft.
But CORBA was haunted by a key principle that limited its influence. Unlike the IP protocol stacks, which are layered from the lowest wire protocols on up to the highest layers, CORBA dictated the highest level protocols and didn't address the lower level protocols. Different CORBA implementations couldn't talk to each other; consequently, CORBA didn't work for my company because we were was trying to design a product that could work across heterogeneous networks of workstations and servers.
If the CORBA folks were so smart (and they were), how could this happen? Why didn't they design the original CORBA protocols from say UDP or TCP on up? The CORBA members were all from different companies, and all had different independent products. There was fierce competition in this space so it was impossible for the members of CORBA to agree on the low level networking protocols because doing so would harm some companies' product lines while benefiting an others.
But CORBA was haunted by a key principle that limited its influence. Unlike the IP protocol stacks, which are layered from the lowest wire protocols on up to the highest layers, CORBA dictated the highest level protocols and didn't address the lower level protocols. Different CORBA implementations couldn't talk to each other; consequently, CORBA didn't work for my company because we were was trying to design a product that could work across heterogeneous networks of workstations and servers.
If the CORBA folks were so smart (and they were), how could this happen? Why didn't they design the original CORBA protocols from say UDP or TCP on up? The CORBA members were all from different companies, and all had different independent products. There was fierce competition in this space so it was impossible for the members of CORBA to agree on the low level networking protocols because doing so would harm some companies' product lines while benefiting an others.