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CORBA is a distributed object technology defined by the OMG (Object Management Group) in its OMA (Object Management Architecture) specification. The architecture has also been adopted by The Open Group. Refer to "Object Technologies" and "Distributed Object Computing" for an introduction to object technologies in general.

CORBA is based on the OMG's Object Management Architecture as discussed in the next section. It was released in 1991 and defined how objects can interact over a special interface bus called an object request broker. CORBA version 2.0 defined how different ORBs from different vendors could work together. CORBA version 3.0, announced in 1999, includes an enhanced distributed component model, the ability to operate through firewalls, and other features.