Categories Programming

Continued from Components in Play

Contrary to Microsoft's pronouncements of a few years ago, CORBA will not be eclipsed by DCOM or even COM+. The Microsoft COM+ technology is closely coupled to the much- delayed Windows 2000 (formerly known as Windows NT 5.0), meaning that COM+ cannot become pervasive until mid-2000 at the earliest, as enterprise managers deal with Y2K problems before rolling out a major operating-system upgrade. Unix vendors are already delivering 64-bit operating systems, just in time to manage large object collections such as those associated with rich-media databases, meaning that CORBA's interoperability will remain an important asset.

In the electronic commerce environment, it's vital for users to feel secure in their use of downloaded active content. Consumers may be willing to tolerate the brand-name assurance of cryptographic signing, but business-to-business e-commerce will be more inclined to demand the more rigorous security of Java and therefore to employ an Enterprise JavaBeans framework that's built on a CORBA foundation.

Both camps will claim "interoperability," but Microsoft's notion of interoperability involves publishing API's to let developers create platform-specific components that communicate with each other on different platforms. JavaBeans portability lets a single piece of byte code move from one platform to another and execute wherever it comes to rest. Different architectures may favor the performance benefits of the former approach or the dynamic flexibility of the latter.

Microsoft promises to offer bridges from DCOM and COM+ to CORBA; CORBA vendors are forced by the prevalence of Windows on the desktop to offer bridges to that COM-based environment. The result is a good news/bad news joke, of sorts. The good news is that there is no wrong choice, and that developers can use whichever model is better supported by their familiar tools and their currently favored platforms. The bad news is that corporate IT architects will need to stay abreast of both of these models if they are to reap the full benefits of component-based design.

Next: Where We Are. . .

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