The Rise and Fall of CORBA There’s a lot we can learn from CORBA’s mistakes. MICHI HENNING, ZeroC Depending on exactly when one starts counting, CORBA is about 10-15 years old. During its lifetime, CORBA has moved from being a bleeding-edge technology for early adopters, to being a popular middleware, to being a niche technology that exists in relative obscurity. It is instructive to examine why CORBA—despite once being heralded as the “next-generation technology for e-commerce”—suffered this fate. CORBA’s history is one that the computing industry has seen many times, and it seems likely that current middleware efforts, specifically Web services, will reenact a similar history. A Brief History In the early ’90s, persuading programs on different machines to talk to each other was a nightmare, especially if different hardware, operating systems, and programming languages were involved: programmers either used sockets and wrote an entire protocol stack themselves or their programs didn’t talk at all. (Other early middleware, such as Sun ONC, Apollo NCS, and DCE, was tied to C and Unix and not suitable for heterogeneous environments.)