Com Components on Heterogeneous Platforms for E-Com Applications
Chandrasekhar Puligundla, Rakesh Agarwal · IETE Technical Review · 2000
In the age of Component technologies gaining momentum, it's good idea to understand various features of these technologies or middle-ware systems. Of the different component architectures Component Object Model (COM) / Distributed COM (DCOM) is one of the leading architecture which is widely used for component design, development and distribution. The main strength of COM/DCOM is integration with the OS and language independence.The advantage that we gain with integration into OS is the performance. The services offered by these architectures are viewed as services offered by OS not as middle-ware services. COM components can be developed using any of the popular languages like C, C++, VB, COBOL, Smalltalk etc. The only requirement is that language must have to support Interface Definition Language (IDL) compiler to translate the data structure across languages. The other requirement is that language must support either references or pointers to pass addresses across.In this paper we discuss about the platform Independent feature of COM components which is in evolutionary stage and Software AG® has come out with the implementation of COM/DCOM on other platforms like Linux®, HP UNIX®, OS/390 et al. We examine this feature on two popular platforms namely Windows NT4.0 Workstation and Red Hat Linux6.0 on Intel® systems. The COM component developed using VB6 (client) running on Windows NT can call the methods of the COM component developed using C (server) running on Red Hat Linux6.0.