By William Fellows
Feedback from Microsoft Corp’s recent COM+ integration and testing drive suggests that resources are flowing into the market at an increasing rate. ISVs we spoke to said they had been impressed with the amount of work going on to ensure COM+ applications are backwards compatible with COM. Microsoft is firing on all cylinders to promote COM+ – a new version of its COM component object model with distributed management functions – much of which will feature in the September release of Windows 2000.
The very real possibility that the uptake of Windows 2000 is going to be slow in comparison to other Windows and NT releases has galvanized Microsoft to begin touting every Windows 2000 advantage that it can. COM+ will feature as part of Microsoft’s Distributed interNet Applications server architecture or DNA on which it hopes to ride into the enterprise.
In announcing a benchmark with National Software Testing Labs that discloses DNA’s reference, hardware, software, source code, and architecture Microsoft is said to be going one better than other component development models. The documentation offers an information cookbook for Microsoft users who want to optimize applications and takes DNA beyond marketecture. Market researchers expect other application server vendors will have to follow its lead.
DNA is regarded as the direct response to the very public and very embarrassing problems National Westminster Bank Plc experienced as the biggest early adopter of NT. DNA is supposed to help take the ‘not trusted’ out of NT. Not all of DNA makes it into Windows 2000 but the code now out at beta is said to be stable. DNA goes up against Enterprise Java Beans, and is held by ISVs in both camps to be more cooked than the Java work. COM+ differs from the DCOM distributed version of COM in the way it manages transactions across distributed architectures.
The biggest hindrance to DNA’s widespread adoption is that Microsoft has said it will not sanction the creation of DNA for use on third party platforms like its on/off/on support for DCOM on Unix. Microsoft originally gave the DCOM-on-Unix project to third parties to develop. Gartner Group, enterprise customers, and partners including Hewlett-Packard and DEC criticized the strategy arguing that if it is as important as Microsoft claims – and Microsoft really does need and interoperability story – then its should be doing the work itself. So it took onboard Software AG’s DCOM port to Unix and currently offers DCOM for Solaris. Software AG has AIX, HP-UX and OS/390 ports.
