Sean Baker IONA Technologies (Ireland)

Sean Baker is a founder and director of IONA Technologies, the designers of the Orbix implementation of CORBA and of the OrbixHome implementation of EJB. His original experience in distributed computing was gained as a faculty staff member in the Distributed Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin. There he worked on many projects, designing and implementing support environments for distributed object system, and also their relationships to databases and persistence in general. In 1992 he co-founded IONA Technologies to exploit this experience. He is the author of "CORBA Distributed Objects" published by Addison Wesley Longman and ACM Press. He is co-author of "CORBA Fundamentals and Programming", published by Wiley.

Keynote: CORBA - it´s role in making software work together

CORBA exists to help customers bridge boundaries while developing software or integrating existing systems. There are many such boundaries that can seriously increase the cost of software development and integration, such as the use of multiple programming languages and operating systems. Other boundaries include those between teams in different departments of a company; or between a company and a set of users on the web. We need to face up to the fact that no software system of any significance can exist today without dealing with these boundaries. CORBA is a multi-language standard for enterprise computing, supporting C++, Java, Visual Basic, COBOL, and so on. It is a rapidly evolving area, to which new standards are added each year. Some of these are particular to specific domains, such as telecommunications, health care or manufacturing; while others are general purpose, system level standards. EJB is the new kid on the block. It is a specification for enterprise computing in Java. Many of the system level EJB specifications are Java translations of their CORBA equivalents. Although CORBA is also a component framework, EJB deeply emphasises the view of building systems from per-canned components. A set of components can be combined to make larger components, and these in turn can be combined to make systems. CORBA and EJB should not be viewed as being rivals. In fact, scalable EJB products sit very neatly on top of CORBA. This talk will briefly outline the current state of CORBA and EJB, and show how the advantages of each can be combined to give a strong multi-language component framework.

Tutorial: CORBA Tutorial: An introduction and an update