To All:
This is good reading for the pro MSFT folks on this net-Go MSFT
To: +BP Ritchie (19122 )
From: +Lawrence Petkus
Monday, Dec 15 1997 5:55PM EST
Reply # of 19124
Hi BP!
The pro-MS article attacking CORBA is attached.Thanks for the information. The main question, howevever,
is "Does a person with CORBA background greatly benefit the development of Novell products? This guy, I
believe, is currently the head of product development at Novell. Do you know the name of the head of product
development at Novell? Does this background mean years of development research to bring out products or
does this look like a product ready
tool?"
Here's the article (the formatting is screwed up , but it reads line by line):
December 8, 1997
A Critic of CORBA Knows Whereof He
Speaks
By David F. Carr
If the struggle between Microsoft and its challengers over object
standards is war, Roger Sessions is a high-level defector.
The author of "COM and DCOM: Microsoft's Vision for
Distributed Objects" is an authority on CORBA, the Common
Object Request Broker Architecture. While at IBM between
1990 and 1995, he was one of the authors of the CORBA
specifications for persistence (the mechanism for storing objects
in files or databases). He now runs ObjectWatch Inc., a training
and consulting firm, and publishes an electronic newsletter on
distributed object technology.
And although he started out focusing on CORBA, Sessions has
become convinced the mix of Java and CORBA technologies
companies like Netscape and Oracle are proposing as
standards for network computing will fail to pose a serious
challenge to Microsoft's initiatives.
Sessions said he originally "set out to write an anti-Microsoft
book" comparing DCOM (the Distributed Component Object
Model) with CORBA. But while Microsoft was impressing him
with an increasingly unified vision, Sessions was distressed by
what he saw as the fracturing of the CORBA coalition.
"Microsoft is a major power," Sessions said, "and if they're
pushing very hard on a technology, it's going to be hard for
anybody to buck that. The only hope is if there's very strong
support in the industry [for an alternative], and I don't see
anybody doing that." CORBA is defined by a consortium, the
Object Management Group (OMG), and consistency has
always been its Achilles heel. The early products didn't work
together at all--or at least not without heroic efforts--because
the specification standardized only a basic object model, not the
network protocol. The specifications were subsequently
improved to guarantee a base level of interoperability, but the
higher-level services built on top of CORBA still differ
considerably between vendors.
Although this is not so different from the variations between
implementations of other technologies that have succeeded as
Internet standards, Sessions believes CORBA lacks the
momentum it needs to compete with DCOM.
"CORBA technology is still not very advanced, and Microsoft
has caught up incredibly in the past year," he said. "The problem
CORBA has right now is that it just doesn't have the support
from the biggest companies, particularly IBM and Sun
Microsystems. Both companies have clearly been sidetracked
by Java."
The official word from IBM, Sun, and others among the
Microsoft challengers is that Java and CORBA are moving
forward in harmony.
Sun and IBM were both founding members of the OMG,
although neither produced a CORBA product that was widely
adopted. IBM was one of the companies that pressured Sun to
reconcile Remote Method Invocation (RMI)--a distributed
object computing technology that is built into Java--with
CORBA. Sun has promised to work with the OMG on
extending CORBA's Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) to
support the unique features of RMI, while also allowing
programs that use RMI to interact with CORBA objects written
in other languages.
But Sessions believes the division has been less resolved than
papered over. Sun still sees Java as a self-sufficient platform for
distributed object computing, Sessions said. IBM's plans also
seem to revolve around Java, although it is working on a
product called Component Broker that is supposed to provide
CORBA-based access to services such as transactions.
IBM and Sun were among the sponsors of a white paper
endorsing the JavaBeans component model as a foundation for
tools that would make CORBA easier to use, but Sessions
believes that vision is still muddy.
He agrees with Microsoft's assessment of Java. "I think they
honestly believe Java is a good language. What they don't
support is the rest of Java--the idea that it supplies this entire
operating system and you can't go outside of that," he said.
Microsoft intends to position Java as a language for writing
components that will be hosted on Windows NT servers, while
eschewing the applet model in favor of user interfaces based on
Dynamic HTML, Sessions said.
Eschewing Java on the client in favor of an object-based view
of HTML, Microsoft says, actually gives the company a
broader platform reach than using Java for user interface
elements (particularly because of Java's slow performance on
16-bit Windows and Macintoshes). But that story is currently
undercut by the Dynamic HTML technologies that work only in
Internet Explorer 4.0.
The strength of Microsoft's approach is not just about DCOM
but also the combination of distributed objects with the
Microsoft Transaction Server, Microsoft Message Queue
Server, and other services that the company is tightly integrating
with Windows NT, Sessions said. By itself, distributed object
computing doesn't work on a large scale, because it relies on
synchronous exchanges of messages. To be effective over the
Internet, where an instantaneous response may not be practical,
objects also need to be able to rely on asynchronous message
queues and transaction processing monitors.
"This is what's needed for large-scale distributed commerce
applications. I don't see that being addressed in a significant
way other than by Microsoft," Sessions said.
IBM, transaction server vendors such as BEA Systems, and
CORBA vendors like Visigenic and Iona Technologies, are all
working on solutions for combining transactional and queuing
facilities for CORBA. But so far, Sessions said, he is not
convinced that they will produce a consistent, compelling
alternative.
The only thing Microsoft really lacks is a convincing
cross-platform story, Sessions said. Although the company has
worked with Software AG to port DCOM to other platforms,
he said, Microsoft clearly wants the world to revolve around
Windows.
On the other hand, while Java focuses on cross-platform
portability, Sessions does not believe the computer industry will
accept a solution that fails to support multiple programming
languages. "CORBA is the only technology that tries to do both
of those, and you know what I think of CORBA right now," he
said.
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