o(ther)l/log

A democratic process such as the OMG's is uniquely ill-suited for creating good software.

Michi Henning

.. in a very interesting view about why CORBA failed. And you cannot blame Michi Henning for not knowing his subject.

The article covers both the technical issues (opaque references, security, versioning, complexity), the market context (Microsoft moves, effect of the bubble) and the huge procedural issues - probably the most important point in the story: most of the technical issues could have been avoided with a different decision flow in the OMG.
However, there is one point which is missing in the picture, imho, it is that the OMG never really acknowledged the problems and tried to fix these. Some were there for good, but others could have probably been solved. One example I have in mind in the over-complex C++ mapping (designed before C++ standardization was finished): why not adding a cleaner, simpler modern C++ mapping ? This raises the question of presenting clear roadmaps for standards, which has not been something stellar at the OMG. CORBA 3 was discussed for years - without presenting a clear picture of which problems it was supposed to tackle. And at the same time, as Michi remarks, the elephant in the room was this bunch of crappy, unimplemented (and often not implementable) specifications for additional services. The OMG never tagged a bogus spec as obsolete (they only obsoleted two things: OpenDoc for obvious market reasons, and XCMF, superseded by the component model).

All of this from the point of view of an outsider. I've never been an OMG member (just a CILab member at some point - oh, the irony), I just did a bit of CORBA development, and taught it for several years.

Ok, sorry for the big delay. Here is a new release (with source) for my S3 Browser application. This version is quite close to the previous v0.1, with some clean-up, Keychain support (it was bugging me from day one), UI enhancements (removed action buttons and added toolbars). Multiple selection now works in objects window, and downloading a file now use a default file name that makes sense.

The code is under a BSD license. if you use this code, I'd love to know about it. Thanks!