Högskolan i Skövde

The business pressures which companies and organisations encounter are steadily growing. They continuously have to improve their efficiency to keep up with these new developments. One very important aspect in doing so is the reinforced adoption of computer based information systems. This paper focuses on a computer based system which is able to automate everyday business communication between distributed team members.

Reliable and confidential message delivery, event notification, the integration of different end devices (mobile phones, PCs etc.) and the message transport across different networks (wireless, wired) have been allocated as the main system requirements. Based on these requirements the performance of two middleware technologies, namely CORBA and Web services, has been compared. The result of this comparison was that both technologies are suited to use for implementing such a system but both too, have strengths and weaknesses in achieving the stated requirements.

CORBA for example, due to several supporting, already included services, allows the programmer to concentrate on the application development itself and use these services to ensure reliable and confidential message transmission. Additionally, CORBA is very efficient in using the bandwidth of the underlying communication network, but makes higher demands to the memory space available on clients. This is critical, if clients are mobile devices with limited resources.

Web service technology is much more modest than CORBA with respect to the client side memory space, but message transmission requires much more bandwidth. Further one there are no built-in security and reliability services available for Web services, like there are for CORBA. Hence it is up the application programmer to manually implement these features; however he has not necessarily develop everything from scratch but can resort to already existing specifications, still having the freedom of developing specially tailored features.

In short could be stated that CORBA is more consequential and consistent and WS technology is more adjustable and flexible.