But their use of CORBA ensures their interoperability with a wider variety of applications both local and across the network, and across a wider variety of platforms.
Hi Justin, i understand your perspective as a SGI user (and employee :), but do try to think from the perspective of a windows user.
Pick up a copy of Visual Basic journal, or Access Advisor, or Lotus Notes Advisor. All these apps are using COM to communicate. There are very, very, very few CORBA apps on the windows client base. There are thousands of COM projects. Go to any IS shop and ask how they develop internal apps -- its usually with PowerSoft, Visual Basic, or some other RAD tool that builds on top of small ActiveX controls.
I totally agree with you that CORBA is the right solution on the server, and Microsoft's DCOM is fairly lame there -- no good cross platform solution.
But on the client, COM is king. And Netscape's implementation is poor -- you CANNOT embed Netscape in your own application like Microsoft IE. That is why Quicken, AOL, Lotus Notes, PointCast, and thousands of IS apps embed IE instead of Netscape. Not because IE is so superior or anything like that, simply because you CANNOT with netscape!!! Maybe with netscape 5, but as none of us depend on NT5/Win98 we don't depend on NS5.
I don't want to get into a technical argument on which is better, COM or CORBA. don't care (didn't care whether OS2 or Win95 was better). COM is here to stay on the client until the point where a non-windows world is the dominant platform on the client. CORBA is the perfect solution for server components. Too bad Microsoft is still forging ahead with DCOM, and NOISE ignores COM where appropriate. |
