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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Donald Ferguson and John Shewchuk overcame a long-standing industry rivalry to collaborate on a standards-based approach to distributed computing. |
In the mid-to-late 1990s, a group of influential computer and software companies, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems, squared off against arch-rival Microsoft over who would define and control the next generation of distributed software architecture. Each side created its own set of protocols intended to enable software systems to seamlessly and securely interoperate — regardless of the languages in which they were written and the operating systems on which they ran. IBM and its partners called their protocols the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Microsoft dubbed its standard the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).
But both failed to gain widespread support, in large part because of the rift between Microsoft and IBM.
"CORBA never actually worked to the extent that we thought it would," says Don Ferguson, who was then at IBM as chief architect of a project that later became the WebSphere product family.
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