COM was not love
Some
bloggers
have COM nostalgia.
I started coding in Java in 1996. I was building a Java code
generator, and the generated application had to be able to
execute in multiple tiers. In that moment made sense to
build an abstraction layer so the application could read a
config file and choose if the protocol to use was going to
be RMI, DCOM or CORBA (similar to what .NET remoting does).
I built the RMI and CORBA stuff pretty easily, but DCOM was
a nightmare. I wanted to spend the same time it took me to
learn and code the RMI/CORBA stuff for DCOM, but that was a
dream. I finally was able to make it work with the Java-COM
list guys' help, and it ended up working quite well. We had
a customer that used a DCOM based application over the
internet with 700 users (rich Java clients), but I always
wonder how that could possibly work ;)
A lot of coworkers were (and still are) using C++ and COM
for they day-to-day job, and even if is much easier now than
then (ATL, etc), I really feel sorry for them even if they
seem to like it (doing hard stuff improves programmers' egos
;). I also feel sorry for my boss that has to pay them to do
such an unproductive work ;)
I think that the only guys that could felt that COM was love where the ones who made money teaching it or writing books about it ;).