Abbreviated CORBA. A standard from the Object Management Group (OMG), whose members include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, DEC, and IBM, that enables communications between distributed object-oriented applications, regardless of the language they are written in and the hardware platform on which they run.
CORBA uses Object Request Brokers to set up communications between objects and to invoke methods on behalf of these objects.
CORBA competes with Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and ActiveX technology.
See also Distributed Component Object Model.