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Sept. 24, 1997

The growing role of COM

The story

The September 1 issue of InfoWorld has an interesting article about Microsoft's COM, entitled "COM rides on Windows coattails", and subtitled Although technically challenged, model may become developers' choice. Here are some selected excerpts:

Although many developers say there is a lot to be desired with Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), the stakes are high for its future because the technology's omnipresence in Windows means developers must make the best of it.

The lack of scalability, inheritance and interoperability with CORBA, the rival object model from the Object Management Group, are COM's drawbacks, developers said. [...] But [Microsoft's] influence in the industry is so huge that many feel COM has already become a de facto standard".

People think it lacks some basic requirements, [... including] some of the true object features like inheritance", said Dwight Davis, editorial director of Windows Watcher. "On the other hand, the world out there is a COM-based world". [...]

Last May the COM architecture took on renewed importance when Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates held it up -- along with its distributed incarnation, Distributed COM -- as the key to Microsoft's distributed computing vision. [...]

The company repeatedly has signaled support for a COM-CORBA bridge -- albeit mostly by pointing to third-party efforts, but many in the industry say Microsoft's talk of interoperability is mere lip service [...].

Microsoft's plans for the next version of the architecture, COM+, promise to lessen its dependence on C++ and add features such as inheritance, a COM run-time engine, garbage collection, and improved persistence.

The article also mentions Microsoft's efforts with various partners to port COM to Unix. Read the complete text for more details.

Our comment

COM is clearly a major interoperability mechanism and ISE has recognized it by providing the EiffelCOM library which positions Eiffel as a key COM technology.

At the same time CORBA is also a key player, partly competing with COM and partly complementary. A major new product, EiffelCORBA, positions ISE Eiffel as (in the words of Steve Hunter from Hunter Object Systems) "the most simple way available today to construct complex, correct, distributed applications"

As the joke goes, "what's great about standards is that there are so many of them". But not all standards are created equal. Some come and go; but COM as well as CORBA are here to stay.

Eiffel users can get the best of both worlds, taking advantage of Eiffel as the ultimate component combinator: the mechanism to build applications out of components coming from all sides, from COM and CORBA to C, C++, Java and many others, as well as legacy code of all creeds and persuasions.

Another comment

It is also interesting to note that all the extensions planned for COM, according to the article, have been present as key components of ISE Eiffel for as long as it has existed: inheritance, garbage collection, a powerful run-time. Correspondingly Microsoft is removing COM's dependence on C++, which has indeed been a problem for many people using COM and searching for more abstraction than provided by an interface which relies heavily on internal structures of the C++ mechanisms ("dispatch tables" and the like), from which Eiffel users are fortunately shielded thanks to the high-level mechanisms of EiffelCOM.

This confirms the benefit of Eiffel's "pure" approach to object technology. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is in fact easier to interface with legacy code and other languages in a "pure" O-O language than in a hybrid such as C++ or early versions of COM, because the roles of each partner -- the O-O side and the non-O-O side -- are clearly delimited, enabling a fruitful collaboration.

We applaud the COM+ designers for going ahead with the kind of full-fledged object model popularized by Eiffel.

Of related interest

Another news story from the same issue: Oracle8 users will wait for new object features.

Reference

COM rides on Windows coattails by Bob Trott and Ted Smalley Bowen, in InfoWorld September 1, 1997, pages 37 and 40. The magazine's Web page is at http://www.infoworld.com.

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