Orbix
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Orbix is a CORBA ORB (Object Resource Broker) - a commercial software product which helps programmers build distributed applications. Orbix is an implementation of the OMG's (Object Management Group) CORBA Specification.
Orbix emerged from research carried out at the Computer Science Department's Distributed Systems Group in Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Several Lecturers and Graduate Students from the group founded IONA Technologies to commercialize the technology. It enjoyed considerable success in the late 1990s, but along with CORBA was somewhat eclipsed by the emergence of Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, due to the perceived difficulty of the technology. Orbix is still however widely deployed in the telecommunications and financial areas, and actively maintained and developed by IONA Technologies.
Orbix is also the name of a battery-operated puzzle toy from Milton Bradley released in 1995. It consists of a ball covered with 12 pressable lights, in which the player attempts to turn them all on. The challenge is when any of the lights are pressed, it affects the state of the surrounding lights. The puzzle was patented by Uwe Meffert on October 15, 1996 and is number US 5,564,702.
