We are working in house, and COM has really been beneficial. Once you overcome the initial learning curve, it is really easy to write a COM object. No matter if they are coded by hand, with MFC, or ATL. I prefer ATL, but there are some tricks to getting an ATL object past the simple OCX level (particularly when exposing multiple interfaces). MFC is very flexible for objects, but the overhead is to costly. One of the guys on our team still hand codes all of his objects.
The best thing about COM, is it forces everybody to build clean, well defined interfaces, and it prevents uneccessary meshing of code. Also, future enhancements will be a sinch, since we have a clean, modular application, and can add new interfaces as needed.
Since CORBA does not have a binary compatibility mode, it won't work well in a local implementation where performance is critical. On the other hand, I'd hate to have my banking transactions handled by a DCOM-based system. Use the best solution for the given problem.
As for Java, the early reports on IBM's java apps is SLOW SLOW SLOW. I don't care if they give it away, nobody will use it if it is a dog. Somebody better get to work on Java runtime performance, or Java will be dead in a year or so.
What do you want to bet that MS is the first to produce a fast Java (albeit a Windows-only version). |
