MICO: An Open Source CORBA Implementation

T he Common Object Request Broker Architecture is a specification for creating, distributing, and managing distributed program objects across a network. Both the International Organization for Standardization and X/Open have sanctioned CORBA as the standard middleware architecture for distributed objects. CORBA was specifically designed to support heterogeneous environments, different vendors’ products, and several popular programming languages. Numerous implementations of the CORBA specification exist today, both in the commercial and the open source domain. MICO (www.mico.org) is one such implementation; I and several other developers are its cofounders. In this column, I’ll discuss MICO’s internal architecture and then offer a few guidelines to help you choose the right CORBA implementation for your purposes.