The authors treat CORBA as the ideal, looking at its powerful Interface Definition Language (IDL), CORBA 2, which lets software developers model objects and interfaces independent of programming languages. (CORBA 2 also works with C/C++, Java, and Smalltalk; the details are discussed early in the book.) Of course, CORBA is not just a way to specify interfaces and the authors look closely at the specification for CORBAservices, a object brokering architecture model that is, at least in theory, a lot richer than DCOM. The authors also explore CORBAdomains, which allow certain interfaces for business objects within particular industries (such as banking and health care) to be built and reused. The authors also investigate CORBAfacilities, which allow applications to share documents.

The latter part of this book looks at the software engineering process and discusses how analysts can adopt CORBA to solve system architecture problems--mainly by retooling old systems and making them work together. This section is a little vague and though it introduces a case study, it doesn't give much detail.