Alternatives to web services?

[Carlisia Campos]

Hi everyone,
If someone is not using web services today, what are they using? What are the possible groups of technologies involved in deploying a communication service that accomplishes what web services can do today?

[JeanLouis Marechaux]

Originally posted by Carlisia Campos:
Hi everyone,
If someone is not using web services today, what are they using? What are the possible groups of technologies involved in deploying a communication service that accomplishes what web services can do today?

CORBA

[srinivasrao marri]

if the alternative is corba why people going for webservice, whats wrong with corba? even j2ee people also prefering webservices now a days. With corba the interoperability is possible like communication with dot net and j2ee? Does corba provides any idl interfaces for dotnet?

[Jim Baiter]

There is a proposal out on an IDL to WSDL mapping. As far as the "CORBA vs. Web Services" question, that is a hot debate, here is a link. My take is one big advantage of web services involves the Microsoft position whereas in the CORBA days, Microsoft was competing with COM/DCOM.
[ May 16, 2003: Message edited by: Jim Baiter ]

[Gary McGath]

You can also use RMI if you're guaranteed that both the client and the server are in Java. RMI is easier to set up than CORBA.