ORBit is a CORBA 2.2 ORB written in C. It was designed
to be small and fast compared to other ORBs, and
supports the C language mapping. ORBit is implemented
as a suite of libraries.
CORBA, or Common Object
Request Broker Architecture, is a specification for
Object Request Brokers, or
ORBs. An ORB is much like a dynamic linker, but it
works with objects, rather than subroutines. At
runtime, a program can request the services of a
particular object; the ORB locates the object and
creates a connection between it and the program. For
example, an email program might request an
``addressbook'' object, and use it to look up a
person's name. Unlike dynamic linking, CORBA works fine
across a network, and even allows different programming
languages and operating systems to interact with one
another. If you're familiar with DCOM on the Windows
operating system, CORBA is analagous.
