In distributed computing, an object request broker (ORB) acts as an agent that dispatches requests to other agents, usually in an effort to speed up response times. GIOP (the General Inter-ORB Protocol) handles inter-ORB communication.

See also CORBA - the Common Object Request Broker Architecture.

to start orb service, part of RMI, in UNIX: orbd -ORBInitialPort 1050&