Integration

The company where I currently work uses a large number of third party components, which is not unusual for someone in our space. In fact it would be far to expensive to develop and maintain many of these components ourselves. The one unifying aspect of these components is that they are all ActiveX/COM based and play well with our development environments.
However, we are looking at some new technology that is dependant on Java RMI where the COM integration solution is using the "java" moniker with the CreateObject method. i.e. Set o = CreateObject("java:Java.Util.Date"). Unfortunately this requires using the Microsoft JVM which doesn’t support RMI out of the box (there is a patch available from IBM). Also MS is not maintaining the JVM and Java 1.4 and above is not supported. The final nail is that object creation with monikers doesn’t seem to be supported in .NET.
Another product in the same space supports COM directly, but in testing with .NET the Interop seems to be leaking memory at an astounding rate, making it non-viable.
Where to go from here? Our next solution spike is to investigate the "greatest application integration technology ever invented by man" - otherwise known as SOAP. The hope is to isolate the peculiarities of each product in an environment that it is compatible with, and additionally insulate ourselves from change a little.

No Comments