RE: CORBA vs. XML (was: Re: XML.COM: How I Learned to Love daBomb)

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

>Has anyone published a point-by-point comparison between CORBA and 
>SOAP/XML-RPC?

You could probably consider SOAP and CORBA as complimentary.  SOAP to
IIOP might be a better comparison.  The three "big" object server models
out there have been CORBA, EJB, and COM+ -- these three use IIOP, RMI,
and DCOM respectively as the primary method to pass information to and
from objects.  Now that SOAP is on the scene; CORBA, EJB and COM+ don't
go away, they just have another way to pass information to and from
objects.  In fact, before SOAP, there were many ways to get these three
different worlds to interoperate -- the difference with SOAP is that the
interop layer is based on XML, supposedly easier to implement than
something like an RMI/DCOM bridge, and so on.  For example, if I have
some objects written in CORBA that provide some service, I no longer
have to convince all of my customers to install an IIOP communication
layer.  With SOAP, the layer that calls my CORBA object could be as
simple as a UNIX bash script that pipes some text through netcat.  So I
think of SOAP as being a universal IIOP/RMI/DCOM substitute that mere
mortals can type by hand.