SOAP frustrations

[John Keeling]

CORBA/IIOP & firewalls....

loewis at informatik.hu-berlin.de (Martin v. Löwis wrote in message news:<j4hefk7xyl.fsf at informatik.hu-berlin.de>...
> johnfkeeling at yahoo.com (John Keeling) writes:
> 
> > Over the internet, you really want to use Web Services rather than
> > CORBA, because CORBA/IIOP uses multiple ports that have to be
> > explicitly allowed on the firewall ( on both the client and server
> > side). 
> 
> That is not true. CORBA can be easily restricted to a single port. If
> you really want to, CORBA can run on port 80.

It is true that a single CORBA server can be restricted to a single
port.
Most CORBA systems use multiple servers ... e.g. Naming Server &
multiple business servers, and hence require multiple ports.
>From my experience, it would be unusual (but possible) to implement
all remote services into one single CORBA server. More common is to
use a proxy to put IIOP traffic through for the multiple servers. As
before, these proxies have not always been available as the CORBA spec
has evolved.

Martin, maybe you know a better way to approach this?

> 
> > Long-term I think SOAP is the way to go, because of the industry
> > momentum in that direction. 
> 
> Just because you can misuse port 80?

It's just an opinion, I don't know for sure.
As above, one typically needs a port for each CORBA server (per host).
It is a major security and admin issue. Why do you think that
CORBA/IIOP hasn't taken over the world in cross-internet services? It
certainly has had enough time to do so. SOAP couldn't have got off the
ground if CORBA/IIOP was ideal in cross-internet environment.
Let me know if I am missing something.
Thanks,
John