Overview
The straight scoop on Microsoft's distributed objects technologies.[In the distributed objects world, Microsoft has had to defer to products such as CORBA, Netscape, and Java Beans. With COM and DCOM, Microsoft is poised to make a large dent in the enterprise market. This book teaches software developers the pros and cons of COM and DCOM. It explains how to use COM and DCOM with their existing systems, how they fit into two and three-tier client/server architectures, and new technologies from Microsoft such as Microsoft Transaction Server and Falcon.This comprehensive guide focuses on Microsoft's vision for distributed commerce-oriented applications. It's lucid, jargonless and comes with independent chapters, so you can choose what to read. It overviews Microsoft Distributed Component Architecture (MDCA). MDCA includes Java, COM, DCOM, transactions, clusters, security and Microsoft distributed commerce applications. By combining Java, COM and DCOM, they offer a complete vision of how to write distributed applications with sophisticated security and efficient management of shared objects. With COM and DCOM, the book reveals the important ideas behind components and how to distribute them. Chapter Three unlocks the power of Java and its Microsoft component model. The following chapter explains when to use COM wrapper, how to create Type Library and how to register your COM clients. The advanced topics include persistence, sharing and scalability, transactions and databases, multi-tier architecture, security, clustering, and message queuing. You will also learn how to use Wolfpack to create highly available clusters of workstations that outperform mainframes at a much lesser cost. The book wraps up with Java and CORBA, the two competitive technologies to MDCA.