This is a collection of links, references, and observations on how
Java and CORBA are coming together. This is of critical interest to
our research group since we i) want the interoperability of CORBA but
ii) also need any software we use to be essentially free (not because
we have no research grants, but to make our research as accessible as
possible).
...
...
...
From the Netscape
Internet Service Broker & CORBA/IIOP Marketing and Licensing FAQ
, it appears that ISB (Netscape's Internet Service Broker) is
a subset of the Visibroker functionality, with a smaller subset on the
client side. The server side include both developer and runtime
licenses. (Curiously, the list
of features includes a dynamic invocation interface but no
static interface -- my guess the static interface is just assumed,
otherwise the included java2idl compiler would make no
sense.) Not much of the CORBA Services is in there, but then I think
most ORB vendors are way behind the OMG in implementing these anyway.
Communicator is, of course, basically free. For educational uses, it looks like we can get the Enterprise Server free as well. This might be a good way to start, and we can see what about whether to move to a different server ORB later on. The main hassle for users who want to use our server-side software is likely to be installing the Netscape Server, as it seems to be fairly cheap: $25 per user (which I assume means number of simultaneous connections?).
I still don't know what else we'll need to write server-side CORBA objects. Confusingly, the examples in Orfali and Harkey's Java/CORBA book require both Visibroker for Java and Netscape Enterprise Server, so I don't really know what's going on here...
The Netscape Internet Service Broker & CORBA/IIOP Marketing and Licensing FAQ includes the following fairly unhelpful information on the relation between JavaBeans and CORBA:
Local copies of some of the netscape documentation:
Links to pages of links: