There was a discussion on XBRL-Public and CORBA was brought up. I wanted to summarize information about CORBA so that I could get back to that information. Here is that summary.
Sees that CORBA is maintained by OMG.
CORBA, or Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is defined by this tutorial as follows:
The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard framework allowing software objects to communicate with one another, no matter where they are located or who has designed them. The Object Request Broker (ORB) is the "middleware" which performs the communication. Objects may reside on the same computer, or different computers connected by a network.
This is the CORBA Basics page published by OMG.
CORBA is similar to Microsoft's DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model). It seems that ActiveX or most people are probably more familiar with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) or OLE Automation or COM (Component Object Model).
The following web pageprovides a bunch of good information on CORBA and DCOM.