Categories Programming

By Peter Coffee

For more than a decade, enterprise IT architects have been promised a golden future based on software component technology. Following 1998's advent of Enterprise JavaBeans, CORBA 3.0-based products, and the first beta tests of Microsoft's COM+ technology, components may finally start to give high-level application designers a quantum boost in reusability of code and reliability of multitier operation.

Software components have come to market under many names: as objects, as VBX controls, as ActiveX and COM (or DCOM) modules, and as cyberspace citizens of the cosmopolitan CORBA. After a two-decade warm-up, it's reasonable for corporate buyers to ask, "Where's the beef?" Component proponents have tantalized IT decision makers with the prospect of substantial reductions in life-cycle software cost, but many buyers may feel that they have been trapped in an endless maze of technical demonstrations and pilot projects. It's time for the people who pay the IT bill to start getting returns on their component technology investment.

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Published as Enterprise Computing in the 4/20/99 issue of PC Magazine.