The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) that enables software components written in multiple computer languages and running on multiple computers to work together.
CORBA is a mechanism in software for normalizing the method-call semantics between application objects that reside either in the same address space (application) or remote address space (same host, or remote host on a network).
CORBA uses an interface definition language (IDL) to specify the interfaces that objects will present to the outside world.
CORBA then specifies a “mapping” from IDL to a specific implementation language like C++ or Java.
Standard mappings exist for Ada, C, C++, Lisp, Smalltalk, Java, COBOL, PL/I and Python.
There are also non-standard mappings for Perl, Visual Basic, Ruby, Erlang, and Tcl implemented by object request brokers (ORBs) written for those languages.
Source: Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORBA)