Java APIs

Hi,

I'm a Comp. Sci. student taking a course in CORBA and RMI and was wondering how relevant these technologies are out in the real world? I have a friend in industry who tells me that these technologies are "dead". He says XML has taken over as a communications standard.

Also, I am in the design phase of developing a 3D online game and I want to know if CORBA or RMI is fast enough to be used in a realtime application such as this (let's say I want to make 10 remote method calls per second to each of 50 clients). Can someone aim me at some benchmarks or performance figures?

Thanks all.