CORBA in the new millenium: the changing landscape

A previous paper by B.P. Blackshaw and J.R. Ellwood (1997) examined the suitability of CORBA for building enterprise level distributed systems. A number of areas of concern were discussed, and the paper concluded that at the time of writing, mid-1997, CORBA was not sufficiently mature for the job, However optimism was expressed that within 2-3 years many of the issues raised would have been dealt with by vendors and the OMG. The article investigates the accuracy of that prediction. It re-visits the issues raised in 1997 and looks at what has changed. It also discusses how the continued Internet revolution and the emergence of Java have changed the distributed landscape, and how well CORBA has adapted to these challenges.