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Interfacing Objects

Currently, one of the biggest problems with both COM and DCOM architectures is that they are supported only by Windows systems. However, most operating systems have their own native way of connecting systems together at a remote procedure call level. At the time of this writing, there are some unconfirmed rumors that Microsoft is planning to create an interface to the Windows operating system using the XML-RPC protocol. This development would bring a whole new world to the Windows applications by increasing their connectivity with all the other platforms. Note that Microsoft has already produced a similar protocol called SOAP.

The COM-based technologies are the focus of Microsoft's development plans for Windows, ranging from operating systems and languages to messaging and databases. Nowadays, new COM-based technologies are found in a lot of places inside your Windows system, such as the ActiveX controls and VBScript processing. OLEDB, for example, is the successor to ODBC. ODBC gives access to relational databases, whereas OLEDB provides a more versatile level of access, so that the same API can be used to retrieve data from all kinds of sources, ranging from flat text files, through Excel spreadsheets, up to ODBC databases.


Last updated on 1/30/2002
Python Developer's Handbook, © 2002 Sams Publishing

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Index terms contained in this section

distributing
      objects
interfacing
      objects
objects
      interfacing and distributing

© 2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.