Resumen
As the computer industry's reliance on component software increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate complex component systems. Modern development environments take a variety of approaches to simplifying this programming problem. This article describes how three programming language implementations provide access to Microsofts Corp.'s component object model (COM) and how they attempt to reduce the complexity of writing and using COM objects. Using COM is complex for two reasons. COM semantics may not match the object semantics of the language and hence require glue code between COM and the application. In addition COM itself is very complex, with a large API and many special cases. Many development environments can provide access to services such as COM. Though COM reflects the linguistic heritage of its creators, it was designed to be accessed from all languages, and it can be. Such access can be straightforward, at least initially. It is also clear, though, the work required to support COM differs greatly from language to language and from environment to environment. Visual C++ and Visual J++ depend on extralinguistic features. INSETS: Using IDispathc from Dylan; Abstract Server Pages.