I am not against CORBA or Object-orientation

Mark Little and I exchanged comments, which you may find interesting, on my last entry. We continued the exchange over instant messaging. Mark’s understanding of distributed computing technologies is great. My discussion with him made me realise that some of my views may have been misunderstood. So, please allow me to clarify the following…

• I am not against object-orientation as an architectural paradigm; I like O-O-based environments as development platforms. However, I try to make the separation between architectural concepts and implementation-related technologies.
• I don’t think that CORBA or any other existing distributed computing technology (object-oriented or not) will disappear overnight just because of Web Services technologies, which I never suggested were revolutionary. I advocate for service-orientation because I believe in the possibilities it offers. The industry will indeed have to find ways of building on its current investments and will not switch overnight to the new platform. Hence, technologies that bridge the gap will be important.
• When I talk about technologies that attempt to facilitate the transition from the previous generation of middleware to the new order of things, I am not suggesting that they are unnecessary or that they are completely wrong but I believe that some (not everyone) will probably misuse them.

I hope that these clarify my position a bit.