Iona Technologies Ltd says it will connect the OMG Corba and Microsoft Corp DCOM worlds with a piece of software it’s testing which it claims can accept DCOM requests and spit Corba IIOP out the other side – or visa versa – without having to install any software on the client. More a bridge than the kind of object translation system offered by Visual Edge Software Ltd. Iona thinks the ability to link the two object environments without installing client software is key, claiming other object companies can’t do the job like it will. Iona says it hasn’t yet figured out whether to sell the bridge or give it away, but promises the software by year-end. DCOM or Network OLE, enables COM (OLE, ActiveX) objects to communicate between separate machines using remote procedure calls (RPCs). It’s been described by Microsoft as COM with a longer wire and is implemented by adding an additional DLL dynamic link library to existing Win32 systems. An example of where the bridge might be used is by a Windows ISV that wants its ActiveX objects to be made available to a Corba object application. Currently it would have to hardwire support for a particular ORB into its product and integrate the two environments. Iona says the company can license the bridge and ship it with its products that will enable its ActiveX objects to be bridged to Corba-compliant environments. Iona says that if the bridge were to be incorporated into a VBA Visual Basic component it would enable all Corba applications to be made available to Internet Explorer users because the Microsoft browser use VBA controls. As Iona and other ISVs evolve their ORBs to incorporate transaction and security services the next level of integration is how Corba applications will be able to communicate with Microsoft’s messaging and clustering technologies (that will mean another round of bunfights over at the Object Management Group, Iona observes).
