CORBA and RMI are "dead"?

843793

Hi,

I'm a Comp. Sci. student taking a course in CORBA and RMI and was wondering how relevant these technologies are out in the real world? I have a friend in industry who tells me that these technologies are "dead". He says XML has taken over as a communications standard.

Also, I am in the design phase of developing a 3D online game and I want to know if CORBA or RMI is fast enough to be used in a realtime application such as this (let's say I want to make 10 remote method calls per second to each of 50 clients). Can someone aim me at some benchmarks or performance figures?

Thanks all.

843793

1. Your friend doesn't know as much as he thinks.

His statement is like saying "Conversation is dead because everybody uses English."

I can't speak about CORBA, but

o We have some very robust applictions written using RMI.
o We wonder if SUN is walking away from RMI totards JAX: an XML-based communications scheme.

2. Your problem is kind of under-specified, but

o the way you phrased it sounds like lots of callback from server to clients - an area RMI handles, but only very well on LANs.
o I suspect your performance will be more limited by network characteristics than by RMI. Unerneath, it's just TCPIP.