Comment Roger Sessions *knows* CORBA! (Score 1) 132
Roger Sessions used to work for IBM, and was a part of the OMG team that developed the CORBA Object Persistence framework. Seems to me that if anyone hoped big things were ahead for CORBA, it would be someone who worked on the CORBA specs personally. At a recent technical lecture I attended in Toronto, Ontario, which was sponsored by Microsoft, Roger Sessions did not give unfair praise to the Mighty MS even though they were paying him. Instead he gave a fairly interesting and robust set of case studies in high-volume transaction-processing and distributed commerce applications and how traditional TP, current and future CORBA standards, and Microsoft COM+ (and the existing COM/MTS/etc) hope to handle these situations. He even said a few things that were hardly complimentary to Microsoft, but he also said that Microsoft tends to get flack for things they don't deserve flack for, such as their lack of interest in cross-platform standards. If you were Microsoft, you wouldn't be either. The question is, who do you want to commit your enterprise's middle tier to for now and in the future? Someone with no commitment to platform independance (Microsoft), someone with no commitment to language independance (Sun/EJB), or someone who flails around and then recants on their earlier convictions (OMG, and their commercial implementors: IBM, and BEA). All around, a pretty mixed bag.
Personally I don't mind Java, and I don't think Roger Sessions went out of his way to make any negative comments about Java itself, he just made the fairly real-world comment that most 3-tier client-server distributed applicaiton developers work in C++, VisualBasic (I choke at this, but it's true), or even COBOL (also a choker).
I don't current work in Java, so it seems reasonable to me that anyone who is expecting that we should all move to Java just to use these scalability services in Enterprise Java Beans is not going to see the kind of quarterly results that they wanted if they base their whole developer product lineup around EJB. What if I need highly tuned compiled components and low level platform services access in my code? Should I go with EJB and code the guts of an EJB in another language, and use Java Native Interface to call some code in C? Sounds like too much work. All that BS about Java being as fast as C++ assumes that your system is constricted purely by network throughput. roger Sessions even echoed this common point and *agreed* with the Java folks that the performance of a system doesn't change much whether it's in C++, Java, or Visual Basic. Personally, I'll beleive the "experts" until I can find a test case in which that isn't true, but when I get there, I don't want to be stuck using JAVA when I need a high performance component.
I bet that a lot of companies are going for an all Microsoft/COM+ middle-tier for now, and using a COM to CORBA bridge or a COM to EJB bridge when necessary for future integration to non-microsoft platforms.
Personally I don't mind Java, and I don't think Roger Sessions went out of his way to make any negative comments about Java itself, he just made the fairly real-world comment that most 3-tier client-server distributed applicaiton developers work in C++, VisualBasic (I choke at this, but it's true), or even COBOL (also a choker).
I don't current work in Java, so it seems reasonable to me that anyone who is expecting that we should all move to Java just to use these scalability services in Enterprise Java Beans is not going to see the kind of quarterly results that they wanted if they base their whole developer product lineup around EJB. What if I need highly tuned compiled components and low level platform services access in my code? Should I go with EJB and code the guts of an EJB in another language, and use Java Native Interface to call some code in C? Sounds like too much work. All that BS about Java being as fast as C++ assumes that your system is constricted purely by network throughput. roger Sessions even echoed this common point and *agreed* with the Java folks that the performance of a system doesn't change much whether it's in C++, Java, or Visual Basic. Personally, I'll beleive the "experts" until I can find a test case in which that isn't true, but when I get there, I don't want to be stuck using JAVA when I need a high performance component.
I bet that a lot of companies are going for an all Microsoft/COM+ middle-tier for now, and using a COM to CORBA bridge or a COM to EJB bridge when necessary for future integration to non-microsoft platforms.
