omniORB is the preferred CORBA impl these days, but ORBit probably still works fine.
omniORB communicates that it's sending UTF-8 to Java, whereas ORBit did not.


Configuring ORBit
-----------------

ORBit must be configured to NOT use its own accelerated transport, but 
instead, the standard IIOP. This is a little tricky. We do this by 
editing the file: /etc/orbitrc and make sure it contains:

ORBIIOPIPv4=1
ORBIIOPIPv6=1
ORBIIOPUSock=0

This could alternatively be located at /usr/etc/orbitrc, or 
/usr/local/etc/orbitrc, depending on how ORBit has been configured


CORBA UTF-8
-----------------

You may need to drop the webapp/WEB-INF/lib/corba-utf8.jar
into $TOMCAT/endorsed and restart tomcat.  This jar contains
a patch to make corba default to UTF-8 if it can't determine
encoding.