At some point in the future there's a good chance that the ORB requirement will be removed from EE entirely. If that happens we need to be able to react and ensure that the JTS continues to work because it’s the most complete distributed transaction implementation that we possess. Now there are two ways to do that:

we ship our own ORB, either JacORB or something else, say.

(ii) we remove the dependency on CORBA entirely.

Whilst is a good short term option, I think we need to look at (ii). An old in-house TM that JBoss had which Narayana replaced had a JTS implementation which supported CORBA and JBoss Remoting (I think it was Remoting). Ultimately what we need is a high performance distributed transactions implementation and JTS is it today but it has a dependency on CORBA that we need to try to remove and yet keep most of the non-ORB generated code/dependencies.