CORBA: E-Commerce and Distributed Computing

The selection of COM or CORBA as an enterprise architecture will affect the tools, applications, and development process used by an organization. Therefore, it is important to make the right choice. Yet it is impossible to evaluate any technology in a vacuum; an analytical comparison requires a consideration of the context and requirements for application development. The information presented here should only be used as part of a comprehensive problem-solving process that includes defining the problem, understanding the technical and managerial requirements, identifying resources, and developing a plan of action. An organization should understand the business problems (and not just IT problems) that an enterprise architecture must solve. This step can avert common mistakes such as allowing the candidate solutions to drive the process, or an implicit assumption that a particular vendor will provide the best solution. As part of this process, an organization must consider the following characteristics of the development environment:

        Size of organization
        Organizational structure; e.g., centralized, hierarchical, distributed, or hybrid
        IT resources
        IT structure and relation to business units of the organization
        IT skills and capability to adopt new technologies
        Acceptability of proprietary solutions versus industry standards
        Acceptability of standards for architecture, applications, and tools
        Level for standardization; e.g., enterprise, department, or application domain

The choices for an enterprise architecture are essentially the following:

        Windows-based environment, COM-only
        Windows-based environment, COM as needed, CORBA for particular distribution capabilities
        Multi-platform environment: CORBA-based enterprise architecture using COM bridges to integrate desktops