Quite right, before Java, enterprise was full with CORBA, DCOM, VB/Delphi, Smalltalk.

Also many are unaware that Java EE was born as a Objective-C framework for OpenSTEP, Distributed Objects Everywhere, which was then ported to Java.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

Which was anyway mostly inspired by Objective-C way, not C++.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html