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

Obviously it depends on the type of server and interprocess communication you are considering. And I think Stephen C and Chris Cleeland cover the Corba's positives very well.

Our application has used CORBA (Orbix) for over 10 years so is legacy now. And for how it is written CORBA is a good technology. However if I was starting over I would probably not use CORBA:

• It is complicated and only a small number of people in my organisation know it very well as a result all hard problems fall on them to solve.
• Recruiting staff can be a problem. CORBA just isn't cool any more and isn't getting cooler Although in Ireland C++ developers are a little thin on the ground too.
• Most Consulting firms want to use web services for integration work, so if you want 3rd parties to do the integration you will probably require a web services api anyway.

Now depending on the type of communication I wanted I would probably consider:

• protocol buffers for lots of small messages (I know that I would have to provide the transport)
• web services for fewer large messages

This is based more on finding staff and expertise, 3rd party support and leveraging open source libraries then the technical quality of CORBA, which I use everyday and is strong if a little cumbersome.