XML and CORBA, Synergistic or Competitive?

The extensible Markup Language (XML) is gaining a lot of attention in the Internet world and is adopted by major companies (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle). XML, the open-standards child of SGML, promises to provide platform- and language neutral data encapsulation and separates application logic from application data. Meanwhile, various object-oriented technologies and standards such as Java and CORBA have also progressed rapidly in the past few years. Java is being presented as the perfect partner for XML. Java supports the development of Web-aware, platform-neutral applications, and XML is a platform-neutral document description meta-language. But doesn’t CORBA promise exactly the same? This paper describes the XML and CORBA ‘approaches’, and the synergies and/or competition between these technologies, taking into account the “philosophy” of each approach. Different criteria are identified where comparison is possible and relevant, such as: specification (e.g. expressive power), deployment (parsing, marshalling, scalability), and tools. XML is the next step in Web-protocols (after IP, HTML). It is concluded that XML can in conjunction with a multitude of other protocols provide the same functionality as CORBA, but will only replace CORBA in those cases where using CORBA is undesirable.