In Februar y, BEA Systems Inc. purchased Digital Equipment Corp.'s ORB and MOM products, ObjectBroker and DECmessageQ respectively. Combining these two technologies may make sense because their capabilities are complementary. ORBs are designed to simplify the job of distributing applications over networks. ORBs let the developer partition those objects onto network nodes and have them communicate with one another as needed when a common application is running. Developers can change code to reflect new business processes without rewriting the entire application.
MOMs have much less programmin g capability.
MOMs are very simple. Mass. But ORBs have their downsides. For one thing, because they're developed to work with objects, they're difficult to use with other systems that are not object-oriented. A more serious drawback is that ORBs don't support asynchronous communications. This reduces their flexibility in handling messages.