CORBA still kicking

ALTHOUGH WEB SERVICES occupy the headlines these days, an older application integration technology still remains viable, offering attributes such as security that are lacking in Web services, Object Management Group (OMG) officials said this week.

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CORBA is a mature system for distributed enterprise systems and integration, said Jon Siegel, vice president of technology transfer at OMG, in Needham, Mass.

CORBA is an OMG specification for application interoperability, independent of platform, operating system, programming language, network or protocol, according to OMG.

The specification contains a security component enabling event passing. Also featured in the specification is the ability to perform 75,000 or more two-phased commit rollback operations per second on a sustained basis, according to Siegel.

"CORBA has these capabilities today and it's going to take Web services years to catch up," Siegel said. "On the other hand, people are using Web services for loose-coupling, message-based applications that don't have the data throughput or high-rate throughput [of CORBA]," he added.

"I would say there will be some niches in the industry where the semantics of Web services are suitable and where they will become used and there will be other niches in the industry where the advantages of CORBA are overwhelming," Siegel said. He said CORBA enjoys an advantage in tightly coupled enterprise environments, transactional systems, systems handling a large number of customer objects as well as security.

CORBA's security includes Common Security Interoperability version 2 (CSIv2), said Siegel. CSIv2 provides for authentication, identification, encryption, privileges, confidentiality, and delegation.

Web services, however, rely on SSL, not as strong a technology as what CORBA has, according to Siegel.

An official at Iona, which sells both CORBA and Web services technologies, said CORBA at present does exceed Web services in areas such as security. But there is room for both the object orientation of CORBA and the business process and simplicity directions of Web services, according to the official, Don Roedner, director of product marketing at Iona, in Boston.

"The critical distinction is that CORBA is a platform on which people can run applications. Web services is nothing more than a way of providing an interface," Roedner said

"Both invite people to think in terms of services and interfaces as opposed to thinking in terms of traditional monolithic applications," he added.

CORBA is not Internet-friendly like Web services, but CORBA objects can be wrapped in Web services, Roedner said.

OMG at its meeting in Helsinki, Finland, last week took several actions involving CORBA and its Model Driven Architecture:

-- OMG adopted a standard allowing servers to upgrade CORBA software without needing to be shut down first. The CORBA online upgrade specification is undergoing a final vote but will be not be changed as a result of it, Siegel said.

-- The Human-Usable Textual Notation (HUTN) for UML was approved to enable UML (Unified Modeling Language) models to be expressed as a text data set, enabling production of a family of text-based editors for UML, Siegel said. HUTN will become an official OMG specification by the end of this year.

-- OMG members approved a request for proposal to standardize a UML profile for the CORBA Component Model (CCM). The profile will allow applications specified in MDA to be realized in CCM. Also, another RFP initializes work on an upgrade to the secure CORBA protocol.

-- Members chartered the Ontology Special Interest Group, to coordinate work in software semantics, knowledge representations and processing, the semantic Web and software agents. The semantic Web is a concept intended to enable more structured, intelligent processes on the Internet.