CORBA vs. SOAP

[Vladimir Ergovic]

I started to do some basic applications in CORBA when I've heard about SOAP. People were telling me that is much faster and easier, so I am wondering what is main difference between these two and is the SOAP much faster. Right now I do some Perl applications and SOAP example doesn't look so complicated. So I was thinking about connection between JAVA and Perl via SOAP.
Thanks.

[david rawheiser]

CORBA is a more mature technology, SOAP is fairly new.
Both are complex, but SOAP may be simplier.
I am fortunate in that I use Sybase EAServer which hides the complexity of setting up the plumbing to enable CORBA to work.
I don't know which one is faster from real experiance; but I would venture a guess that it isn't SOAP because it has the overhead of wrapping a RPC in an XML document to send its request across the network. Your milage may vary.
But on the other hand, it is easier to forward SOAP requests thru network firewalls than to setup security access for CORBA objects.

[Edy Yu]

I am exploring SOAP in my current project. I am using Java and Apache SOAP 2.0. I have some comments on this topic:
1. As I heard, SOAP is faster than CORBA. Why? I don't know.
2. SOAP uses HTTP as connection protocal. It's great to avoid firewall related issues.
3. SOAP addes XML format body to HTTP request/response. This is the real beauty as far as I am concerning. It makes HTTP calls become semantic.
I am primarily using SOAP RPC. But I'll start playing SOAP Messaging soon. I think the more I play with it, the more I'll learn from it.
Edy
Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform (SCJP)
Sun Certified Developer for Java 2 Platform (SCJD)

[karl koch]

sorry for posting this again. it was a reply on davids "My $0.02" first. i just posted it here again to keep things together.
hi,
i dont remember where but i read:
SOAP uses HTTP. So any Firewall configured for HTTP will also let pass SOAP calls. for now. firewall vendors will come up with solutions to block SOAP for security reasons. then, from the firewall view, SOAP and CORBA are the same.

karl

[Steve Lam]

To reply 'Is SOAP faster than CORBA' :
SOAP sends messages in XML called envelopes that cannot be intermittently processed. Therefore the messages gets to the server faster. However, CORBA allows the marshalling and translation of data before the procedural call and will delay the message transmission.
So, in terms of transmission time, the message gets to the server-side faster under a SOAP implementation.