CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), is a distributed
object architecture that allows objects to interoperate across networks
regardless of the language in which they were written or the platform on
which they are deployed.
CORBA allows developers to write applications that are more flexible
and future-proof, to wrap legacy systems, and to code in the language they
know best.
The Object Request Broker (ORB) is the middleware that handles the communication
details between the objects. The CORBA 2.0 standard, adopted in December
of 1994, defines true interoperability by specifying how ORBs from different
vendors can communicate using a common protocol.