Billy Brown wrote:
> Well, I can see some of us haven't been keeping up with what's happening on
> the other side of the fence.
Correct. I don't put much effort into following Microsoft's offerings.
I constructed this COM+ features list by bullet-pointing bits from
your message:
* a run-time environment for your components
* handles all your cross-process communications and networking issues
* component pooling
* connection pooling
* distributed transaction management
* use them in VB code
* dynamic load balancing across servers without programming
* configure security on components
FWIW Java 2 Enterprise Edition <http://java.sun.com/j2ee/> covers
analogous ground. I don't doubt that Microsoft's solution is easier,
particularly for the existing legions of Visual * developers,
and tight OS coupling (the pejorative form of "integration") has
benefits, though it's certainly possible to get no-code component
distribution/migration/balancing without it. On the other hand multiple
implementations and portability do have advantages.
For an obviously biased comparison, see
<http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/ejbvscom.html>.
I'm not much of a fan of Sun, but I'd be hard pressed to adopt anything
that forced me to use Windows. Unfortunately there don't seem to be
any good alternatives for mainstream "enterprise" applications. All the
big vendors are providing Java and/or COM interfaces.
Apart from open source J2EE (partial) implementations, the
possibilities seem clustered around web-centric development (e.g.,
<http://www.zope.org/>) or raw distributed computation (Beowulf and
friends), but nothing exactly in the "distributed transactional
component framework" space.
Mike
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