The Next Big Web Technology Advance: Object Web and CORBA
Web'97 is already quite elaborate at the client/browser side but still rather simplistic at the server side (base HTTP with CGI extensions).
New Java Frameworks (Enterprise, Media) bring new family of Java servers that can implement an object based middleware and backend layers for the Web based services including computing.
One critical development in the distributed objects domain is the IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol), mandatory in CORBA2 and offering a new server-to-server communication standard between commercial ORBs from various vendors.
At the moment, Web Server market is dominated by customized or/and proprietary systems but there is a new strong tendency to standardize the Web middleware around the CORBA paradigm.
'Java based ORB' is a CORBA2 compliant ORB written exclusively in Java, and hence fully portable and ready to run also on the Wintel platform, where distributed objects were so far under control of Microsoft DCOM/ActiveX model.