How is RMI related to CORBA?
RMI is a distributed object system that enables you to easily develop distributed Java applications. Developing distributed applications in RMI is simpler than developing with sockets since there is no need to design a protocol, which is an error-prone task. In RMI, the developer has the illusion of calling a local method from a local class file, when in fact the arguments are shipped to the remote target and interpreted, and the results are sent back to the callers. CORBA was designed to be platform and language independent. Therefore, CORBA objects can run on any platform, located anywhere on the network, and can be written in any language that has Interface Definition Language (IDL) mappings. Similar to RMI, CORBA objects are specified with interfaces. Interfaces in CORBA, however, are specified in IDL. While IDL is similar to C++, it is important to note that IDL is not a programming language. For a detailed introduction to CORBA, please see Distributed Programming with Java: Chapt
