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The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

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Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#21

Post by blowski »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #12

The old adage: "the first rule of distributed objects: don't distribute your objects". DCOM and EJB also came unstuck by failing to observe this rule. It's impossible for young'uns to appreciate just how obsessed the software world was by 'objects', OO and the chimera of reusability in those days; I subscribed to 'Object' magazine, and still recall one article breathlessly predicting that in the future bespoke develo…

> one article breathlessly predicting that in the future bespoke development would become bunk as folks would just buy e.g. an Aircraft object off the peg and plug it into their application

Every time I consume a third-party’s REST API, I’m doing that, no? Albeit the article may have oversold the idea in the work ending there.

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#23

Post by seren »

js2 wrote: post #2

The Wikipedia page says the most recent version of the standard is 3.4, published in 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A... In my 25+ year career I haven't seen it in use anywhere. I only ever encountered it while getting my CS degree.

I am still working on a code base that has slowly evolved from around 2000 with as its core CORBA as the internal communication bus between actors, so we still use it. We likely want to remove it because it is a bit an overkill in our application, but at the same time it is working and no one wants to pay for a rewrite.

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#24

Post by spaintech »

My first exposure to CORBA was 1996/97 where it was used to deploy a major distributed infrastructure. It worked quite well to manage and integrate this large scale deployment, some of it expanded beyond just one datacenter, so it was nice to have a really good control system to manage thousands of services across such a large estate with minimal user intervention. Applications were patch and upgraded through the CORBA services and we scaled the system to provide national and international infrastructure services. I would wager nearly 20 years since I had insight into how that infrastructure worked that this is still running… Obvious use case is telcos.

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#25

Post by quickthrower2 »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #12

The old adage: "the first rule of distributed objects: don't distribute your objects". DCOM and EJB also came unstuck by failing to observe this rule. It's impossible for young'uns to appreciate just how obsessed the software world was by 'objects', OO and the chimera of reusability in those days; I subscribed to 'Object' magazine, and still recall one article breathlessly predicting that in the future bespoke develo…

I vaguely remember those spinning balls in Windows 2000, XP etc. to know your DCOM components were working. Are they still a thing? We did the 3 tier DNA thing, using VB because in VB it was simple, in C++ it looked hellish.

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#26

Post by nabla9 »

Marc Andreessen was all about CORBA. James Gosling said that JVM (Java Virtual Machine) was more important than Java itself. Remember EJB.

In the end it did not matter if the technology was good or bad. Microsoft effortlessly killed everything that was not theirs to control.

Now we have n:th iteration, more simple with less ambition. WASM, HTTPS, REST, json...

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#27

Post by Animats »

We might see a comeback of something like CORBA. One of the things CORBA was supposed to do was to enable a mechanism to ask a server "How do I talk to you"? While that wasn't really used much, it has real potential for the LLM era. We need technologies where a client asks the server how to talk to it, then generates the appropriate requests automatically.

For example, you should be able to ask anything with a shopping cart how to buy stuff. Especially for B2B E-commerce.

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#28

Post by HlessClaudesman »

b800h wrote: post #11

I was about to opine that this title was an homage to the 2009 GI Joe movie, but then I realised it had been written prior to the film's release. I can only assume that in actual fact, "GI Joe: The rise of COBRA" was in fact an homage to this article.

COBRA in production: 29 minutes of imagined glory, 1 minute of ignominious RETREAT!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thbICk05yPk

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#29

Post by lelanthran »

winrid wrote: post #7
lelanthran wrote: post #3

I remember how CORBA was all going to be the future. I wrote dozens of programs in C++ and Python using IDL. Funny, though, that we now find ourselves doing the exact same thing but it is "an API", has no type-checking, no error handling, requires more work, is limited to particular languages and is slower. Distributed objects were ahead of their time by maybe 15 years. Now we're stuck in async API-over-JSON hell for…

Why no type checking? Generate an Open API client for target languages. Done. Assuming you need an API. I'll never build an app that way again, it's not worth my hands. I'd rather use Hotwire, or LiveViews, or Django's Unicorn for the web part. Zod looks nice too.

> Why no type checking? Generate an Open API client for target languages.

I dunno. Why aren't more people using openapi?

What I see in practice is that almost everyone is using JSON as the transport mechanism and not generating that JSON serialisation code from open API specs.

The type-checking in CORBA was not opt-in, it was mandatory.

Type-checking in browser fetch() calls are optional. To opt-in you have to go outside of the standard.

Re: The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)

#30

Post by hinkley »

I interviewed with AT&T for a job and the interviewer was sure a piece of concurrent code was sound and I was sure it was not, but couldn’t articulate it at the end of a long day.

I would have been working in CORBA when it was already on its way out. Silver lining that was a bullet I dodged entirely, except of course having the pay the opportunity cost all early Java devs paid because there was an ORB in the JDK for ten+ years.

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