As Microsoft prepares developers and independent software vendors for Longhorn, the next version of its Windows operating system, the company wants to wean them off older Windows programming models.
Speaking at the Developing Software for the Future Microsoft Platform conference in Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre here Monday, Microsoft software architect Don Box said the company will not invest much more in Component Object Model (COM) and Distributed Compound Object Model (DCOM)--Microsoft's mechanisms for sharing objects between programs. Instead, Box said, programs will use managed services based on the Extensible Markup Language to communicate with each other. Box is leading the work on the "plumbing" part of Longhorn, called "Indigo," which is effectively the successor to Microsoft .Net and as such will dictate how programs are written in future Windows platforms.
Moving developers away from the object-oriented world is a key element of Microsoft's battle for mindshare with the likes of IBM, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, Oracle and other rivals that sell products based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard. Microsoft has made inroads into large corporations with its back-end server software. However, J2EE-based systems are still generally favored by such customers for more-complex computing jobs, such as running stock exchanges or high-volume Web sites.
News source: C|Net News.com
