This page is about current state of CORBA affairs. Not much info yet, so please add some more if you care.

Status

The thread about it started on the dev mailing list on 07/01.

Rick !McGuire wrote:

• Currently, Geronimo is using the Sun 1.4.2 ORB, and the OpenORB code is going to be removed very shortly.
  Unfortunately, the Geronimo code wrapped around the Sun ORB directly references Sun internal ORB classes (and in a couple cases, subclasses major ORB classes), so it is highly release dependent.  For example, the current code won't compile cleanly on Sun's Java 5, or IBM's 1.4.2, because the underlying ORB code is completely different.
  

after Alan's and Aaron's responses, which are summarized below as possible solutions, Dain wrote:

• If it comes down to fixing OpenORB or writing our own ORB, I think  writing our own will be faster.  OpenORB is quite difficult to  understand and was written before many modern concepts like IoC were  introduced.  The biggest problem this the current OpenORB codebase is  that it doesn't properly implement IIOP so it cant talk to any other  ORBs (and it is difficult to find the code to fix).  Anyway, I say we  stick with the sun orb until something better comes along.
  

Possible solutions

1. Write a different JVM-specific adaptor for each environment we wish to support (presents an interesting build problem, because regardless of which JVM you used to build Geronimo, at least one of the adaptors will fail to build because the required classes wouldn't be present)
2. Try to find a means of implementing the current function using completely portable interceptor code (is possible, but I'm guessing that we might still end up with some small piece of JVM-specific code)
3. Fix and use OpenORB (we did not pursue because of time constraints)
4. Implement Our Own ORB (we're not super-excited to start a project of that magnitude from scratch - we do tend to favor the whole "incorporate best of breed project" approach! - but I imagine it would be at least be considered if nothing else worked out)
5. Some vendor donate their own certified ORB to ASF
6. All of the above.

References

• The Community OpenORB Project
• CORBA Technology and the JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition