Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA, is a time-proven, platform-neutral, client-server remote invokation techonology. Contrary to a popular perception that CORBA is only to be replaced by modern technologies such as Web Services, it has certain advantages over the newer technologies, and it still plays important roles in large enterprise IT environments.

The CORBA specification has had many internationalization features, partly based on Unicode technology, for years, but it has not been implementated widely until recently. IONA has implemented these features in the release of its flagship product, Orbix Application Server Platform (ASP) 6.0, which is available since early this year.

During development of CORBA internationalization features of ASP 6.0, we faced several issues such as mapping among several encoding naming schemes, choosing encoding conversions framework, performance problems arrising from Java Runtime Environment, locale-based default encoding mechanism, etc.

This presentation is for infrastructure developers and potential users of CORBA technology. Participants are expected to have some basic knowledge of various internationalization standards such as Unicode legacy character encodings, and IANA charset registry. CORBA specific internationalization features will be introduced in this presentation. We will discuss various issues we faced and choices we made.