CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a specification developed by OMG (Object Management Group). It describes a mechanism of messaging by which the objects distributed over a network can connect regardless of the language and the platform used to develop those objects.
CORBA consists of two basic kinds of objects.
A service provider is an object that has some functionality and can be used by other objects.
The client- that needs the services of other objects.
Both these objects communicate with each other autonomous of the programming language used for designing them and the OS in which they run. Every service provider defines an interface that describes the services supported and supplied by the client.
IDL – Interface Definition Language
A keystone of CORBA standards is the IDL. Interface Definition Language is the OMG standard for characterizing language-neutral APIs and determines the platform-free delineation of the interfaces of the distributed objects. The competence of CORBA environments to give consistency between the servers and clients in various environments starts with a standardized definition of the data & operations comprising of the client/server interface.
IDL is this standardized mechanism.
CORBA uses it for describing the objects’ interfaces.
Specifications of CORBA governs that there’ll be an (ORB) Object Request Broker via which an app interacts with the other objects.
In exercise, the app initializes ORB and connects with an internal object adapter that maintains the things such as reference counting, object lifetime policies, and object instantiation policies.