Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of CORBA and RMI

Distributed object architectures and Java are important for building modern, scalable, web-enabled applications. This paper is focused on qualitative and quantitative analysis of two distributed object models for use with Java: CORBA and RMI. We compare both models in terms of features, maturity, legacy system support and ease of development. Focus is given to performances. We present performance results based on real world scenarios that include single client and multi-client configurations and different data types and sizes. We evaluate multithreading strategies and analyse code in order to identify the most time consuming methods. We compare the results and give hints and conclusions. We have found that because of its complexity CORBA is slightly slower than RMI in simple scenarios. On the other hand CORBA handles multiple simultaneous clients and larger data amounts better and suffers from far lower performance degradation under heavy client load. The article presents a solid basis for making a decision about the underlying distributed object model.