DCOM for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Make the Internet Your Own Personal Network, the Microsoft Way for High Tech Jobs"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

The future of computers and computer careers is networking, especially with that grand network of networks, the Internet. DCOM is a part of that.

DCOM / Distributed Common Object Model is Microsoft's development of a special application of networking. Crunching numbers and other data are secondary functions of computers in the 3^rd millennium – they are communication tools linking human beings as we’ve never been linked before, and DCOM facilitates that.

And we must like it, because the trend is accelerating and won’t stop. Basically, no matter how smart one computer is, hook up another computer to it, and they’re both now four times as smart. DCOM is there to make us many times smarter.

When all computers are hooked up to make full use of the Internet, how smart will we be?

However, even now, most computers stand alone. Whether they are giant old mainframes with ancient legacy software or your individual PC. Hooking them together is a problem DCOM helps with.

That’s changing, but there are technical obstacles.

Not all computers are alike, not at all. There are many different types, brands, operating systems, versions of software etc. Historically, these have excluded each other. We know that a Unix program will not operate under Windows. So, how can they operate together as a network.

The info tech industry is working on this problem from many angles.

One solution is DCOM (Distributed Common Object Model)

Microsoft’s definition of DCOM is: "An object protocol that enables ActiveX components to communicate directly with each other across a network. DCOM is language-neutral, so any language that produces ActiveX components can also produce Distributed Common Object Model applications."

DCOM was designed to be interoperable with all computing platforms, hardware and software.

That means Distributed Common Object Model was designed to work with data, software etc (all "objects" in object oriented programming) of all sizes, shapes, colors and – not least in these days when it seems that the info tech development world consists of Microsoft at war with everybody else – brand names.

It’s not difficult for a software program to deal with objects on one computer or objects which can be found somewhere on the network to which the program is installed. Finding and working with data that may be stored in an otherwise incompatible and conflicting database software program installed on an otherwise incompatible and conflicting type of computer with an otherwise incompatible and conflicting operating system – that’s a horse of another color. But that’s what it is designed to do.

DCOM has its roots in COM (Common Object Model) which is simply COM that’s not distributed.

Not hard, no? COM is a technology which basically can find objects anywhere on an individual computer or network, which certainly isn’t as hard as doing it across different networks. COM has its roots in a technology called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), which old-time Windows users probably have heard of.

OLE was advanced for its time. I remember puzzling over the involved explanation in a Paradox database user’s manual. Basically, however, it allowed you to work with the same data with different software programs. For instance, you could dump an Excel spreadsheet into Word.

Anyway, Microsoft improved OLE into COM. COM is the de facto standard for developers building single machine applications that communicate with other applications. Then Microsoft developed a technology for extending COM across networks, especially the Internet, that is, across which everything is "distributed." DCOM is often called "COM on the wire." It is an example of the popular concept, "plug and play."

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