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Component Object Model

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9 views

Component Object Model

Uploaded by

nareshvarshney29
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Component Object Model

Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) technology in the Microsoft Windows-family of Operating Systems
enables software components to communicate. COM is used by developers to create re-usable software
components, link components together to build applications, and take advantage of Windows services. COM
objects can be created with a variety of programming languages. The family of COM technologies includes
COM+, Distributed COM (DCOM) and ActiveX® Controls.
The Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) is a platform-independent, distributed, object-oriented system
for creating binary software components that can interact. COM is the foundation technology for Microsoft's
OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), ActiveX (Internet-enabled components), as well as others.
COM specifies an object model and programming requirements that enable COM objects (also called COM
components, or sometimes simply objects) to interact with other objects. These objects can be within a single
process, in other processes, and can even be on remote computers. They can be written in different languages,
and they may be structurally quite dissimilar, which is why COM is referred to as a binary standard; a
standard that applies after a program has been translated to binary machine code.

In general, a software object is made up of a set of data and the functions that manipulate the data. A COM
object is one in which access to an object's data is achieved exclusively through one or more sets of related
functions. These function sets are called interfaces, and the functions of an interface are called methods.
Besides specifying the basic binary object standard, COM defines certain basic interfaces that provide functions
common to all COM-based technologies, and it provides a small number of functions that all components
require. COM also defines how objects work together over a distributed environment and has added security
features to help provide system and component integrity.
COM uses globally unique identifiers (GUIDs), which are 128-bit integers that are guaranteed to be unique in
the universe across space and time, to identify every interface and every COM component class. Human-
readable names are assigned only for convenience and are locally scoped. This helps ensure that COM
components do not accidentally connect to the "wrong" component, interface, or method, even in networks
with millions of COM components.

LPC: Local Procedure Call, RPC: Remote Procedure Call, DCE: Distributed Computing Environment
Distributed Component Object Model

DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) is a set of Microsoft concepts and program interfaces in
which client program object s can request services from server program objects on other computers in a
network. DCOM is based on the Component Object Model (COM), which provides a set of interfaces allowing
clients and servers to communicate within the same computer.
For example, you can create a page for a Web site that contains a script or program that can be processed
(before being sent to a requesting user) not on the Web site server but on another, more specialized server in
the network. Using DCOM interfaces, the Web server site program (now acting as a client object ) can forward a
Remote Procedure Call (RPC ) to the specialized server object, which provides the necessary processing and
returns the result to the Web server site. It passes the result on to the Web page viewer.
DCOM can also work on a network within an enterprise or on other networks besides the public Internet. It
uses TCP/IP and Hypertext Transfer Protocol . DCOM comes as part of the Windows operating systems.
DCOM is generally equivalent to the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA ) in terms of
providing a set of distributed services. DCOM is Microsoft's approach to a network-wide environment for
program and data objects.

The main difference between COM and DCOM can be summed up as follows:

Component Object Model is a Microsoft Technology that enables software components to communicate within
the same machine. On the other hand, DCOM extends COM to support communication among objects on
different computers. Thus, DCOM is just COM with a longer wire.

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