The Object Management Group® (OMG®) has adopted CORBA/e™ (CORBA/e for embedded) as a standard. Drawing on more than 16 years of experience with the CORBA® middleware, OMG has designed CORBA/e to have the best of both worlds: dramatically minimizing the footprint and overhead of typical middleware, while retaining the core elements of interoperability and real-time computing that support optimized distributed systems. See CORBA/e Formal Specification.
CORBA is a mature, standard middleware that combines the interoperability, deterministic execution, and absolute dependability required by distributed embedded systems. CORBA standardizes the interoperability, and Real-time CORBA defines the deterministic execution platform that these systems need, but the full versions of these specifications were designed for a resource-rich, dynamic environment. To adapt these specifications to the resource-constrained, static embedded environment, OMG developed CORBA/e. CORBA/e sheds the dynamic and high-resource aspects of CORBA (such as the Dynamic Invocation Interface, Interface Repository, and Components) while retaining full interoperability and the real-time infrastructure including static scheduling.
CORBA/e Text Resources
CORBA Explained Simply, Ciaran McHale
A concise book for people who want a technical understanding of the concepts and terminology of CORBA without learning the low-level details. Check it out here.
For technical details, please view the CORBA/e flyer or view the entire specification on this resource page.
Constrained by memory limitations, performance requirements, and physical and cost considerations, each embedded system design requires a middleware platform tailored precisely to its needs – unused features occupy precious memory space, while missing capabilities must be tacked on. By providing a family of CORBA/e profiles, OMG lets embedded-system designers select the one with exactly the capabilities they need in a middleware platform, without burdening them with features they don’t need
Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman & CEO, OMG
For more than a decade, IONA has been a leader in the CORBA market and we view the introduction of CORBA/e as a significant milestone in the evolution of this important industry standard. For our customers that want to extend their existing enterprise CORBA systems to take advantage of new embedded applications, CORBA/e offers the benefit of seamless integration, helping them to achieve a greater return on their CORBA investments.
Neil Kenealy, Senior Product Manager, IONA
For the last seven years OCI has been supporting an open source implementation of CORBA called TAO. We have been noticing the increase in our embedded systems’ user base. Users, who had previously shied away from CORBA, seemed to have decided that by taking advantage of TAO’s open source code they could tailor and thus shrink CORBA into their resource limited domains. Now there are OMG standard profiles for tha demanding market segment. Those profiles reflect typical user needs and show that CORBA is no longer just about enterprise systems. Embedded wireless is the future and CORBA is already there.
Dr. Moshiri, CEO of Object Computing, Inc.
CORBA/e allows developers to achieve the ultra-fast performance required for distributed real-time and embedded applications. From resource-constrained devices requiring small footprints to large-scale systems in military/aerospace, telecommunications, industrial process control, robotics and more, CORBA/e is designed to meet even the most demanding requirements of performance-based embedded applications without forfeiting the interoperability, portability, and platform independence that CORBA has built its reputation on. As editor of the CORBA/e standard, we have been privileged to be involved in an open standard that represents the next generation of CORBA.
Joe Jacob, Senior Vice President, Objective Interface Systems, Inc.
PrismTech applauds the OMG’s CORBA/e initiative, with its support for multiple embedded profiles such as the Micro and Compact profiles and with the ability to add additional domain specific profiles as CORBA/e evolves in the future. We believe that CORBA/e ORBs will be accepted as the key middleware technology even in the most resource constrained embedded systems such as those found in DSP and micro-controller environments.
Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech.
A substantial percentage of the effort expended to develop distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems today goes into building ad hoc and proprietary middleware, or additions to applications to compensate for missing middleware functionality. Unfortunately, this approach yields substantial recurring life-cycle costs, particularly for complex and long-lived DRE systems in mission-critical domains. The CORBA/e specification - and the products that support it - are a crucial step toward eliminating many tedious, error-prone, and non-portable aspects of developing and maintaining applications for DRE systems.
Dr.Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University.
