CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), is a
distributed object architecture that allows objects to interoperate
across networks regardless of the language in which they were
written or the platform on which they are deployed.
CORBA allows developers to write applications that are
more flexible and future-proof, to wrap legacy systems, and to code
in the language they know best.
The Object Request Broker (ORB) is the middleware that handles
the communication details between the objects. The CORBA 2.0
standard, adopted in December of 1994, defines true
interoperability by specifying how ORBs from different vendors can
communicate using a common protocol.