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The CORBA standard is created and controlled by the Object Management Group (OMG). It defines APIs, communication protocol, and object/service information models to enable heterogeneous applications written in various languages running on various platforms to interoperate. CORBA therefore provides platform and location transparency for well-defined objects, which are the fundamental underpinnings of any distributed computing platform.
In a general sense CORBA "wraps" code written in another language into a bundle containing additional information on the capabilities of the code inside, and how to call it. The resulting wrapped objects can then be called from other programs (or CORBA objects) over the network. In this sense CORBA can be considered as a machine-readable documentation format, similar to a header file but with considerably more information.
CORBA uses an interface definition language to specify the interfaces that objects will present to the world. CORBA then specifies a "mapping" from IDL (Interface Definition Language) to a specific implementation language like C++ or Java. This mapping precisely describes how the CORBA data types are to be used in both client and server implementations. Standard mappings exist for Ada, C, C++, SmalltalkSmalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. The language was generally released as Smalltalk-80 and has been widely used s, Java, and PythonPython is an interpreted, interactive programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990, originally as a scripting language for Amoeba OS capable of making system calls. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme, Java and Ruby. Python is develo. There are also non-standard mappings for PerlImage:Programming-republic-of-perl. gif|right|framed|Programming Republic of logo]] Perl also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is a programming language released by Larry Wall on December 18, 1987 that borrows features fr and TclTcl (originally from "Tool Command Language", but nonetheless conventionally rendered as "Tcl" rather than "TCL"; and pronounced like "tickle") is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout that is generally thought to be easy to learn, but powerful implemented by ORBs written for those languages.
The CORBA IDL is only one example of an IDL.
As well as providing users with a language and a platform neutral remote procedure callA remote procedure call RPC is a protocol that allows a computer program running on one host to cause code to be executed on another host without the programmer needing to explicitly code for this. When the code in question is written using object-oriente specification CORBA defines commonly needed services such as transactions and security.