Exposing COM via XML-RPC or Something Else

William Tanksley wtanksle at hawking.armored.net
Fri Dec 3 22:27:49 EST 1999


On 1 Dec 1999 20:42:32 GMT, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
>On 1 Dec 1999 18:27:33 GMT, William Tanksley <wtanksle at hawking.armored.net> wrote:
>.On Wed, 1 Dec 1999 09:41:21 -0500 , Brian Lloyd wrote:

>.>> At any rate, SOAP provides a Simple Object Access Protocol.  
>.>> Just what you
>.>> need.  And it's essentially XML-RPC, and it's made to grok COM.

>.>> Highly satisfactory.  Now all we need is a truly open COM 
>.>> implementation.

>.>Maybe not - IMHO SOAP is a good step forward, since you will
>.>now be able to just implement SOAP-aware Python objects instead
>.>of mucking around with COM. You can still interoperate with 
>.>existing COM objects - hey, you could even declare them to be 
>.>"legacy" code :^) 

>.Yes, but you can only write COM objects on a COM-supporting platform.  I'm
>.not aware of any freely available ones (although WINE might have
>.something, its docs don't mention it).

>.I'm helping a friend implement COM for his OS, so I'm a bit grumpy ;-).
>.It's a cool system.

>I just read through a huge bunch of literature regarding 
>the comparison of COM and CORBA.

www.cetus-links.org?  I've been going through that too.  Excellent.  Any
other places you'd recommend?

>CORBA still seems to be more mature. The only reason to use COM is,
>if you want to interoperate with the Microsoftproduct world.

CORBA is NOT a component standard -- it's an interoperability standard.
It's HUGE!

>The big part of the microsoft COM platform is the MTS (microsoft transaction
>server) if you want to do to distributed objects.

Um -- that's true for COM+, but COM doesn't need it to operate.

>Why not stick with CORBA and SOAP, where needed? :)

Because both are huge, bulky, slow, and require preprocessing.  COM and
SOAP work together _much_ more simply, and COM is far easier and faster to
code.

One thing I like about JavaBeans, though: they're data-driven rather than
code-driven.  I'm thinking of specifying a 'bean' format for my OS's COM
objects to allow the same thing.  Of course, the result would be
incompatible with COM, but hey.

Does anyone know of a free implementation of COM?  I can't find any, and
I'm suprised, because COM is very simple.

>	Bernhard

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley, in hoc signo hack




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