Role of Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) - Computers - Programming

Distributed Component Object Model or DCOM is a proprietary technology of Microsoft used in communicating with software components in network based computers. DCOM is an extension of Microsofts COM technology and provides communication facilities for Microsofts COM+ server architecture. In a custom software development environment, COM can be used to create reusable software components and link components to build a distributed software application. DCOM to a greater extent succeeded in solving marshalling and garbage collection related issues using DCE/RPC (Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Call).

COM provides APIs to create components, which can integrate custom applications or diverse application can communicate with each other. Whereas, DCOM helps COM objects in one computer to similar COM objects in another computer and accesses the procedures used. In DCOM both remote and local objects are accessed in the same manner.

Use of DCOM has many advantages in web-based software development service. A single website can communicate with different web servers (besides its own web server) at the same time and serve the requesting browser with different information. For example, using DCOM, a News portal can access different web servers across the world and make remote procedure calls (RFC) to get diversified information simultaneously.

Microsoft provides DCOM interfaces for various Windows-based application services such as Microsoft Active Directory (AD), Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Windows Management and Instrumentation (WMI) etc.

Software development companies prefer DCOM as it can make use of the network traffic and the network protocol without effecting network parameters or other communication channels using the network. Also, DCOM provides robust security to distributed applications without any security-related coding or design in the component or the client.

In terms of providing a set of distributed services, DCOM is equivalent to CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) which is used in non-Microsoft environments. However, the implementation of newer distributed mechanisms for communicating with different platforms over the Internet has, in fact benefited the end users to a greater extent. Moreover, DCOM can be ported to other environments standards, such as the UNIX platform as well.