Customization of distributed systems using COM

Distributed computing is moving into the mainstream because of advances in high speed networking and the Internet's explosive growth. Object oriented programming has become the dominating paradigm for developing reusable software. Distributed objects combine these two trends and are becoming increasingly popular. More and more software systems are built as distributed object applications, and they often share the needs of some basic features such as remote invocation, versioning, load balancing, and fault tolerance. The Component Object Model and Distributed COM2 either provide some of these features directly or provide an architecture that facilitates building such features. COM specifies an architecture, a binary standard, and a supporting infrastructure for building, using, and evolving component based applications. It extends the benefits of object oriented programming, such as encapsulation, polymorphism, and software reuse, to a dynamic and cross process setting. DCOM is the distributed extension of COM. It specifies the additional infrastructure needed to further extend the benefits to networked environments. By using COM/DCOM as a platform to build distributed object applications, researchers and developers can concentrate on important issues specific to their applications, without devoting significant effort to building the supporting infrastructure.