Good guide to CORBA?

Question

Anyone know of a good guide to CORBA? I've never used it and I'm going to have to write a Java (Not my native language I'm a .Net Developer) proof of concept app that uses CORBA.

Answer 1

Website: Java and CORBA

Website: Short Guide to CORBA

Website: Java & corba

Here is a jav & corba sample: java_corba(PDF)

Answer 2

If you are the kind of person who likes to read specs, the OMG is the place to go for CORBA information.

Answer 3

You can use the SUN CORBA tutorial on http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/corba/corba.html. It's based on the Java ORB implementation, which has a lot of shortcomings, but is usable. It gives a good overview of the whole technology too. If you just want to dive into the coding, try some of the tutorials on the web. They can be fairly specific to the ORB you're using though.

Until you're sure of yourself, I'd recommend using the plain Java ORB. It's about the most basic one available, so any concepts you pick up using this ORB will carry to other ORBs. I'd avoid it for anything other than test/toy apps though.

You could also try logging onto a community website (or here!) with any specific questions you have. Try http://www.orbzone.org/, it's run by Iona, but they try to be impartial.

Answer 4

I did a fair amount of actual CORBA development in a previous position, ranging from just using it for distributed objects up to and including design and implementation of a simple custom transport.

The two books I found most useful:

Pure CORBA by Fintan Bolton

Advanced CORBA Programming with C++ by Michi Henning and Steve Vinoski

Pure CORBA is probably the easier of the two to actually learn CORBA from. In general, you will find that CORBA implementations inter-operate very well at run time but that the source generated by the IDL compilers differs. It's probably a good thing to pick one implementation and learn the fundamentals on that. Once you've selected an implementation, check out the vendor documentation - it can also be surprisingly useful.

Answer 5

Unfortunaletly there is lot's of bad literature about CORBA out there.

The best C++ CORBA book in my opinion is Advanced CORBA Programming with C++ from Michi Henning and Steve Vinoski ISBN 0-201-37927-9

For Java (contains also C++) I used Pure CORBA from Fintan Bolton ISBN 0-672-31812-1

This book has the advantage that one can to compare the C++ and Java code for certain CORBA topics.

For specific answers about language mappings it is also good to have the OMG standard ready. However that standard is not suitable to learn CORBA at all. It's a pure reference.

Answer 6

Hi, my 2 cents comment.

Before doing any programming stuff, I suggest to digg out some overview info about CORBA so that you are clear about the overall architecture design. I found out that this article is quite a pretty simple and short article to know what CORBA is about.

Hope this help!!