Traditional operating systems only dealt with application binaries and not components. Hence, the benefits of good component-oriented design have till now never gone beyond the compilation step. In an object-centric world is’nt it still a puzzle why operating systems can’t recoganize objects? For a long time now, operating systems have been dealing only with application binaries a.k.a. EXEs. Objects in one process could not communicate with objects in another process using their own defined methods. The operating system defined certain mechanisms of inter-process communication like DDE, TCP/IP, Sockets, memory-mapped I/O or named pipes etc. These objects needed to use these OS defined mechanisms to communicate with each other.

ActiveX/COM - A Truly Distributed Object-Oriented Architecture

Components developed using Microsoft’s COM provide a way by which two objects in different object spaces or networks, could talk together by calling each other’s methods. This excellent technology forces the operating system to see applications as objects.

COM forces the OS to act as a central registry for objects. The OS takes the responsibility of creating objects when they are required, deleteing them when they are not, and handling communications between them, be it in the same or different processes or machines. One major advantage of this mechanism is versioning. If the COM object ever changes to a new version, the applications that use that object need not be recompiled.

The wonderful thing about COM components is that they are never linked to any application. The only thing that an application may know about a COM object is what functions it may or may not support. In fact, the object model is so flexible that applications can query the COM object at run-time as to what functionality it provides.

Garbage Collection is one other major advantage to using COM. When there are no outstanding references (a.k.a. pointers) to an object, the COM object destroys itself.

COM supports Marshalling. Distributed Computing purists will attest to the fact that marshalling is the process of packaging and transmitting data between different address spaces, automatically resolving pointer problems, preserving the data’s original form and integrity. Even though COM objects reside in separate processes or address spaces or even different machines, the operating system takes care of marshalling the call and calling objects running in a different application (or address space) on a different machine.

Over and above all this, COM is a binary standard. A fully compliant COM object can be written in any language that can produce binary compatible code. So you can write ‘em using C, C++, Java, J++ or Visual Basic. All of the Windows NT shell has been written using COM.

More to come soon...

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This site was developed and is maintained by Gopalan Suresh Raj

This page has been visited times since March 13,1998.

Last Updated : Apr 4, '98

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