ORBs (Object Request Brokers) are now commonplace. The proliferation of the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) standard and ORBs' acceptance by application vendors have made them easily accessible.

If you're building an enterprisewide distributed application, however, it's best to standardize on a single ORB to minimize management and API differences. IONA Technologies' OrbixMT is clearly the one to choose. The latest version of Orbix is easy to manage, thanks to the inclusion of a set of tools for GUI configuration, server management and interface repository.

In the lab, Orbix's performance really shone. Its fully multithreaded implementation gave it the edge for building server applications. We also found Orbix to be developer-friendly, with highly CORBA 2.0-compliant interfaces and operation.

Microsoft Corp.'s Transaction Server 2.0. is an exceptional distributed object technology on the Windows platform, and it has shown even the CORBA world how simple management of distributed objects can be. Borland International's VisiBroker 3.2 also receives an honorable mention. Its agent technology makes operation with multiple ORBs on a network a snap.

OrbixMT, $2,500 (Windows version), $6,500 (Unix version),
IONA Technologies,
(800) ORBIX-4U, (617) 949-9000.
www.iona.com