Know anything about this? Why would Corel need what 3Com, Cabletron, Cascade & Cisco need?
Modern enterprise software has to leverage legacy information resources. In other words, they want to write new software that works works with the old stuff, too. Extending that idea, it would be nice if different software components and applications (not just new versus old) running on different operating systems could work together.
Consider a room with 4 people who each spoke a different language. In order to have unrestricted inter-personal communications, each person would have to know 4 languages. Alternatively, you could add one more person who had his own language but knew all of the existing languages as well. He could act as a broker between any two communicating parties such that each person would only have to learn one more language -- the universal one.
That is precisely what ORB technology does. It's a standard for middle-ware that allows, say, a Visual Basic program to interact with a COBOL program or vice versa. Let's say you invent a new language next week called FUBAR. If you want to interact with software components and applications writen in other languages on other systems you will need to add an interface to the common language that everybody understands. In other words, you will need a FUBAR ORB. Visigenic sells ORBs for all the popular languages and platforms based on an industry standard called CORBA, or Common Object Request Broker Architecture. |
