Distributed object middleware vendors and tools
Inprise's Visibroker
Several years ago Visigenic was the most prevalent licensor of object request brokers (ORBs) with its Visibroker product.
Today Visibroker is slowly losing market share as an independent ORB because of the purchase of Visigenic by Inprise.
Inprise has an application server product based on Visibroker that competes directly with many of Visigenic's licensees. Many of the licensees have therefore turned to other ORB solutions.
IONA's Orbix
Much of the slack created by the Inprise purchase of Visibroker has been taken up by IONA, an Ireland-based software company.
Many think that IONA has been overwhelmed in terms of supplying engineering support due to its newfound role as the most widely distributed independent ORB.
Nonetheless, Orbix is probably the most widely used and licensed independent ORB in the market at this time.
Object ERA's JBroker
JBroker was emerging as a popular Java-specific object request broker. Its performance is considered top of the line.
Recently, however, ObjectERA was acquired by application server vendor SilverStream. Though SilverStream plans to sell JBroker as an individual ORB, JBroker's tight ties to the
SilverStream product may relegate it to a fate similar to Visibroker's.
Other important commercial ORBs and Object Wrappers include:
- Object Request Broker (ORB): A program that controls communication between clients and objects on servers.
- Object Wrapper: Object wrappers control communication between clients and objects on a server. They allow heterogeneous object environments to interoperate with or without a request broker.
| Vendor | Product Name(s) (if applicable) | Subcategory |
| ExperSoft (Vertel) | CORBAplus | * |
| Inprise (Borland) | VisiBroker | * |
| IONA Technologies | Orbix | * |
| ObjectERA (SilverStream) | JBroker | * |
| PeerLogic | LiveContent Broker | * |
| BEA Systems | M3 | * |
| Visual Edge | Madrid | Object Wrapper |