Is CORBA legacy?

Question

For a distributed computing project starting today, with 0 legacy components, are there any good reasons to look into CORBA?

Answer 1

From the existing answers, this gets into almost a religious topic. One can look at CORBA the same way as the half-empty/half-full glass: on one hand, CORBA is dated legacy cruft, and on the other hand it's relatively stable with several implementations available and the "devil you know".

In my line of work, I see CORBA deployed in embedded systems, real-time systems (CORBA has RT extensions), and the like. There aren't many alternatives AFAIK.

Another "advantage" of CORBA is the availability of several high-quality open source implementations, e.g., TAO, MICO, JacORB, etc., with differing licensing and support models. There are also still commercial editions available.

With regard to "most" CORBA apps being implemented in Java--that's not the case in my experience. While the language mapping for CORBA to Java is one of the nicest there is (which may not be saying much), Java already has a very nice distributed computing model that offers richness beyond CORBA, and all-Java apps use that more than CORBA. The vast majority of CORBA development I've seen is in C++ (which is also the worst language mapping).

Finally, CORBA offers standardized asynchronous client-side invocations in the form of AMI, but never offered asynchronous handling on the server side. TAO offers a non-standard server-side implementation called AMH.