The advocacy of CORBA is naive and does never go to a conceptual level.
Hopefully some use as a reference catalog. The future will tell (but I doubt it: it will be soon incomplete, outdated, or non-conforming to the actual products...)
The use of "soap-boxes" (originated by Marshall T. Rose?) is a good idea.
One way to access the CORBA/OLE comparaison is to go first to the last chapter, look at the tables, and then go back earlier to find explanations for the terminology. Good luck...
p 56, FYI: ORB vs RPC
A review of the advantages of CORBA vs plain RPC:
basically method of a class, vs plain function invocation.
p 57-58 Object Services
A concise list of the various services, developed
in chapters 6 to 10.
p 246 CORBA's Common Facilities
Business objects and frameworks: these
concepts are totally non-convincing to me. They are nowhere defined (in
posititive terms, through a contents), nor identified (as a need, distinctive
from other concepts).
p 253-254, Soapbox on SNMP and CMIP (and CORBA)
[W]e're not so sure SNMP is still the way to go. [...] We need smarter systems management software that knows how to deal with smarter objects anywhere [...]
p 459, Quote of Sara Williams
How can a system be designed such that binary components from different vendors --written in different parts of the world at different times-- are guaranteed to interoperate?The good question. But answered neither by CORBA nor by OLE, as far as I understand.