The 13 Corba 2.0 submitters have apparently whittled themselves down to seven, a figure that may be trimmed further by the time of the March 7 deadline, when interoperability proposals need to have reached the Object Management Group. The aim of Corba 2.0 is to provide a mechanism – one of the missing links – that will enable applications under one Corba 1.1 object request broker to access services provided by any other implementations. In effect, this will enable independent software vendors and users to bypass the incompatibilities between different brokers, but there are several ways in which this could be achieved. Some, such as SunSoft Inc and Iona Technology Ltd, and ExperSoft Corp have already outlined their plans. Now Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, HyperDesk Corp, the Open Software Foundation and NEC Corp are expected to submit a joint proposal, based around the Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, for a multi-protocol gateway. Of the other contenders, Bell Northern Research Europe proposes an alternative gateway solution, Symbiotics is proposing an architecture-neutral exchange system, IBM Corp is using its Distributed Object Systems Management and ICL Plc will use its Dais object framework technology.
