Common Object Request Broker Architecture

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between systems on different operating systems, programming languages, and computing hardware. CORBA uses an object-oriented model although the systems that use the CORBA do not have to be object-oriented. CORBA is an example of the distributed object paradigm. CORBA enables communication between software written in different languages and running on different computers. Implementation details from specific operating systems, programming languages, and hardware platforms are all removed from the responsibility of developers who use CORBA. CORBA normalizes the method-call semantics between application objects residing either in the same address-space (application) or in remote address-spaces (same host, or remote host on a network). Version 1.0 was released in October 1991. CORBA uses an interface definition language (IDL) to specify the interfaces that objects present to the outer world. CORBA then specifies a mapping from IDL to a specific implementation language like C++ or Java. Standard mappings exist for Ada, C, C++, C++11, COBOL, Java, Lisp, PL/I, Object Pascal, Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. Non-standard mappings exist for C#, Erlang, Perl, Tcl and Visual Basic implemented by object request brokers (ORBs) written for those languages. The CORBA specification dictates there shall be an ORB through which an application would interact with other objects. This is how it is implemented in practice: The application initializes the ORB, and accesses an internal Object Adapter, which maintains things like reference counting, object (and reference) instantiation policies, and object lifetime policies. The Object Adapter is used to register instances of the generated code classes. Generated code classes are the result of compiling the user IDL code, which translates the high-level interface definition into an OS- and language-specific class base for use by the user application.