Section: NEWS

Standards

The long-sought ability to run applications on different servers in far-flung places over the Internet without an army of high-end developers came a step closer last week as the Object Management Group (OMG) adopted the CORBA Component Model.

The last of a slew of esoteric technologies that comprise CORBA 3, the Component Model has implications far greater than its acronym-strewn lineage would indicate.

The model, expected to be officially adopted by the OMG board in December, will make it easier for a broader group of developers to take advantage of the complex CORBA interoperability services.

Once tool makers and object request broker vendors support the emerging component model this fall -- and a bevy of them already have -- writing applications that can run on legacy systems and the parade of new, emerging Enterprise JavaBean-compliant application servers will be some 80 percent automated, said officials at OMG.

C++, C, Cobol, Java, Ada, SmallTalk, ActiveX -- all these languages and their components will be more deeply integrated via the CORBA Component Model.

The model also holds promise as an enabler of the latest acronym buzzword -- enterprise application integration (EAI).

"It helps to bring the old and the new together," said Ralph Galantine, a senior product manager for CORBA at Sun's JavaSoftware division, in Cupertino, Calif. "This is important because it makes distributed programming easier."

The latest CORBA development helps jibe the old with the new because CORBA is already supported by many legacy systems. The tight Java alignment now offers entree to a burgeoning standard for Web development.

"This means you can continue to code in whatever language or languages make sense for you," said Richard Soley, chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group, in Framingham, Mass. "I can drop all these types of components together and they will work. This is for deploying across heterogeneous systems, and that's the core of the EAI problem. This is about supporting EAI."

CORBA 3, the release of which is about a year late, enables tighter integration of CORBA with Java and other component technologies, including Microsoft's ActiveX, making it easier for programmers to leverage CORBA's interoperability attributes. The new middleware technology maps one component model onto other component model, including JavaBeans.

The latest alignment of CORBA with the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 1.1 specification, a product of Sun's Java standardization process that a year ago adopted CORBA protocols, makes the relationship between Java and CORBA especially cozy.

"Now CORBA becomes a multi-language component of EJB, so the EJB model has been extended to many languages," said Anne Thomas, an analyst at Patricia Seybold Group, in Boston.

She added that developers of high-end Internet commerce applications can, for example, use C++ and/or Java where they wish to craft the desired capabilities and best performance.

CORBA 3 will enter the mainstream about the same time that Microsoft's Windows 2000 and its associated tools are released, but the differing component frameworks will be in many ways bridged for developers.

Choosing among the Windows or object approaches will be a function of the developers' intent for their applications and architectures, analysts said.

Object Management Group, in Framingham, Mass., is at www.omg.org.

Tools and object request broker makers will update their products to support CORBA 3, including these early adopters.

• Sun Microsystems

• Iona Technologies

• Inprise

• IBM

SOURCE: OBJECT MANAGEMENT GROUP

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By Dana Gardner