Welcome to the Java CORBA User's Site!

This Web site is an attempt to collect together useful information about Java and CORBA and how to use these two technologies together.

This site grew out of Steve Barber's attempts to keep the site for the book Programming with Java IDL up to date. In the process, other topics and approaches to the material emerged that didn't really fit in with the book but were too interesting to ignore.

Because of its early association with the book on Java IDL, a lot of the material here is focused on that ORB. Happily, much of this material is not easily available elsewhere. Other ORBs are well-supported by their vendors, but Java IDL is just a small piece of the huge JDK and doesn't get a lot of attention from Sun. So I hope that having a place to keep the collected wisdom and discoveries of the Java IDL user community turns out to be valuable.

(Java IDL is a reference implementation of a CORBA Object Request Broker for Java, including support for the IDL to Java Mapping Specification as well as a transient implementation of the CosNaming service. Java IDL is included as a core package in Sun Microsystems' Java 2 release (also known as JDK 1.2).)

The rest of the material is divided into two parts. The first part is general and examines the evolving relationship between Java and CORBA, in terms of the OMG specifications and also in terms of system construction principles that, while they are specific to Java/CORBA systems, are not specific to an implementation by any vendor. The second part is a collection of observations about vendor-specific implementations of CORBA in Java that I felt were not well covered or at least well-organized or made easily accessible by the vendor or other publications.