Archictecture and Performance of Java-Based Distributed Object Models: CORBA vs RMI

This paper presents a comprehensive comparison of thearchitectural differences and similarities of the two most popularJava-based distributed object models: RMI and CORBA. Performanceand timing issues related to the CORBA and RMI architecturesare also considered. The following aspects are studied for clientserver applications, on Sun UltraSparcs under Solaris 2.5.1 andPentium II under Windows NT 4.0: response time for method invocationwithout parameters as well as with variable number of parameters;response time for applet clients, and response time for variablenumber of clients requesting the same service. The goal is toprovide a reference framework that supports the selection ofeither mechanism for the development of web-based distributedreal-time applications: chat programs, interactive games, sharedboards, etc.