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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 ;).

 

1 Comment

  • That was really good stuff...



    I have just started working with C++ and ATL stuff as an application programmer, but working with ATL is also little difficult b'coz u may require to go through about 100 pages of msdn just to find out where and how ur IUnknown member fuctions are impemented.



    When you go through those huge number of pages u will recognize that all u do is create an abstract base class for CComObject which contain AddRef Release and QueryInterface fuctions.This is the class which is actually instantiated by the Class Factory.

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