Some vendors have this capability in their CORBA orbs. Visigenic's orb,
e.g. can (pretty much tranparently) wrap IIOP in HTTP or HTTPS to tunnel
through client firewalls.
My concern about this approach, whether it's SOAP or HTTP tunneling of IIOP
is that it's a cobbled together solution for what should be a non-problem.
We need to do a lot of evangalism in the corporate security community to
convincingly demonstrate that properly configured, IIOP channels in their
firewalls (and around their proxy servers!) are no more (and probably
less), dangerous than the ubiquitous HTTP on port 80. The only reason
we're even tempted to migrate to doing RMI/RPC via HTTP is because it's the
lowest common denominator for security.
As far as SOAP as a way to tie together CORBA, RMI and DCOM is concerned: I
doubt that's Microsofts goal. Even if it is, XML is a small part of the
solution. Any of us could write code to re-marshal and un-marshal IIOP or
DCOM into XML very easily. But these three protocols are not semantically
equivalent, and you can bridge them only with significant effort, or by
applying (again) a least common denominator approach that throws away as
much as it salvages.
At 10:24 AM 10/21/99 +0200, you wrote:
>Using DCOM for this is virtually impossible, but the same is more or less the
>case with RMI/IIOP because of firewall problems, although in a controlled
>extranet configuration one could configure the firewall to let through IIOP
>packets. SOAP is a way to package a DCOM call as an XML message and thus
>overcoming the firewall problem, while COM components running on an intranet
>would still use DCOM to communicate.
>
>A similar approach would IMHO be very useful also for the EJB/CORBA world.
>
Steve Demuth
Director of Technology Research
Artemis Alliance, Inc. An Inprise Premier Partner
2750 Lannon Hill Road
Decorah, Iowa 52101
651-227-7172 (Typically Mon-Tue) or 319-382-0593 (Wed-Fri)
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