| The
Electra research project was started in early 1992 and ended in 1998. The
goal of the project has been to develop a fault-tolerant CORBA object request
broker. In this sense, Electra was the first CORBA ORB to provide fault-tolerance
through dynamic object replication.
Even though the inclusion of fault-tolerance
features was successful, my 6+ years of CORBA research & development
led me to the conclusion that CORBA does not provide an adequate abstraction
for mission critical applications, which need to be highly available, scalable,
and extensible. This criticism applies not only to CORBA, but also to other
middleware systems built on the remote object- or remote procedure invocation
model.
Back in 1997, this conclusion led
me to start focussing my attention more on the message-oriented middleware
(MOM) paradigm, and to the development of the iBus Java MOM product.
Is the MOM paradigm more successful
than CORBA? I really think so! First of all, MOM middleware has a much
larger market share than CORBA. IDC predicts that MOM market share will
increase at least until 2005, whereas object invocation middleware will
decrease
in market share.
But the proof is in the pudding.
Take the eBay
LiveAuctions site for example. This real-time auctioning system can
support thousands of user simultaenously, and is built purely on Java
Message Service (JMS) middleware, namely on
Softwired's
iBus middleware product. |