Comparing DCE and CORBA

Many people perceive DCE and CORBA as competing technologies. Indeed, both support the construction and integration of client-server applications in heterogeneous distributed environments. Comparisons typically focus on differences between individual capabilities or on differences between the maturity of specifications and products that conform to them. There is a fundamental difference between DCE and CORBA, however, that we feel far overshadows either of these criteria as a basis for selecting a distributed computing platform. This document summarizes the main features of DCE and CORBA, presents what we feel is the most important difference between them, discusses differences between individual capabilities and the maturity of both specifications and products, and concludes with our view of how an organization should select the technology most appropriate to its distributed computing goals.