Re: COM on mac
Re: COM on mac
- Subject: Re: COM on mac
- From: Sheehan Olver <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 21:29:10 -0600
Thought I'd point out a couple things. First off, DO might not be OS X
only, since GNUStep on linux does support Distributed Objects. I'm not
sure if GNUStep DO's are compatible with OS X DO's, but as they are
both based on OpenStep there is a good chance they are. Since GNUStep
is open source, someone could theoretically port libFoundation to
windows, if someone also ports an Objective-C runtime. Along with the
open source angle, if someone ports a unix compatible DCOM library, it
could posibly be used with an OS X binary, but it probably requires OS
level hooks. Finally, you mentioned the use of java. Since you can
program cocoa with java, you could always use RMI as your method of
communication. This would satisfy the cross platform requirement, and
it would probably better to do an enterprise GUI application in java so
you can share code.
On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 08:23 PM,
email@hidden wrote:
Mind if I make a suggestion, someone needs to put together some of
these
topics in a nice coherent article and post it as prominently as
possible on
a website. The information that we've covered both on and off this
list in
the past 24 hours on this topic has been more enlightening than the
past 6
months of reading stepwise, tidbits, and the orielly macdevcenter
sites.
Distributed Objects aren't clearly documented. If someone had simply
said
DO is roughly equivalent to DCOM or COM+ to me months ago, I'd have
been 6
months ahead of the game. Fortunately, this is a spare time thing for
me.
I make my living from Windows software.
Even Apple's own documentation of porting windows software to OS X
focuses
on the event model. All of this is great if you are talking about an
app
that runs on one machine, store it's data locally, or uses published
internet protocols.
In the enterprise environments, where, unfortunately, VB is king, and
Java
is queen, distributed code is part of the design. Yet in all my
research of
the past 6 months, I found few references to DO, and what I did find,
it
never clicked until this thread, that you don't have to use DO on
separate
machines :-). This puts DO and DCOM/COM+ on the same playing field.
Certainly they aren't interoperable, which is a shame in part, I'll
touch on
that in a moment, but they do offer up a key piece of functionality
that I
was missing. I suspect I'm not the only one :-), after discussing
this with
a friend this evening, one who has used Macs for years, but had always
programmed for Windows because that's what paid the bills, I came to
realize
that he had the same blind spot. He knew about the AppleScript
approach,
but didn't have a clue about the DO approach.
Both of us started thinking about it and we both concluded that the
shame of
it not interoperating is that it means that it's very difficult to
replace
Windows desktops in the enterprise, because of the number of VB apps
that
rely on DCOM and COM+ functionality. For example, the shop that he
and I
are both working in is a Windows shop. Not because of any particular
allegiance to Windows, they also use Sun, and Oracle where
appropriate, but
because of the existing DCOM / COM+ infrastructure for some internal
apps,
written in, you guessed it VB.
Now that we've had this discussion, as an exercise of my own
curiosity, I
wrote a quick client side app, to connect to a 'server' object
(running on
said friends Pismo PowerBook) that connected to the Oracle database.
It
does exactly what I wanted it to. It was done in just over an hour of
work.
Impressive. The problem is that it's still limited to only running on
Macs
without reworking both the server and the client, and even then, since
a
switchover would mean changing a couple thousand machines at once, that
isn't going to happen. You can't do an orderly migration. On the
other
hand, there is also the question of scalability of a solution like
this on
the Mac. Considering the dearth of clear documentation, finding
benchmarks
to sell the CIO/CTO on is going to be a bit sketchy :-).
I think we all recognize that Apple isn't making a concerted effort to
push
into the Enterprise, yet, but this thread certainly has me thinking
about
what it would take.
Thanks all of you for the time and thought put into the conversation,
it's
been very enlightening.
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