OOP

COM: Component Object Model

See: web object model

Also: jni-notes

Announcement

ActiveX release announced. Question: fast, threadsafe INC/DEC part of ActiveX distribution?

IDEA: registry on unix: Berkeley /etc database?

COM specs . Also: DCOM specs (points to internet draft)

SURF: altavista search for IDispatch yields: PDO/COM paper.

That reminds me: next webobjects contains "support" for everything from Java to ActiveX ; Next and Netscape team up

compare type library stuff with CORBA's interface repository. Compare implementation repository with CoGetClassObject.

COM, IDispatch for comp.lang* FFI

compare IDispatch with other dynamic stuff: smalltalk, dylan, python, perl, (investigate problem reports from Sankar, digital creations). Extreme: Tcl.

Yikes! Somebody has done it! (need to compare with TclDii@@) visual Tcl hmmm... gotta keep in touch with other folks in the lab:

TclMFC, an interface to the Microsoft Foundation Classes that was developed at the Telemedia, Networks, and Systems group at MIT.

another gem, perhaps for the Amaya folks:

the port of Tk must go through a lot of relatively low-level work to achieve the level of portability that it does. This includes hooking into low-level event loops to intercept windows messages. Due to this and other similar problems, we were unable to get the Microsoft Foundation Classes, which we wanted to use to build our user interface, to coexist reliably in the same process with the Tk port

Interesting group: papers by NMIS

Hmm...: this paper keeps coming up: OLE Automation in Netscape, 03/22/95

COM and python runtime? python conference paper on SWIG interface generator

COM and perl runtime: study perl FFI technology

scheme48 FFI:

Modula-3 runtime: interactions between COM interface pointers, AddRef/Release and traced heap. Does the java runtime have the same problem? For details on MS Java VM, see: MS JVM native method interface

FastCGI as a com transport or custom marshalling? fcgi.isl

CORBA and COM can get along, no? kinda like PDO/COM. Is this what digital does (common object model?)

COM and ILU

MIDL vs ISL impact: where are the mismatches?

• MIDL/DCE support a lot more C pointer semantics than ILU or CORBA
• arrays?

compile type library from ISL? Dispatch interfaces?

Runtime Impact:

• separate ilu_Class into vtable and type record (ITypeInfo)
• resolve COLLECTIBLE vs. AddRef/Release?
• resolve Publish/Lookup with IMoniker stuff. (binding context?)
• ilu per-server stuff?
• COM per-interface marshalling? (I see ILU has a per-class creation hook)
• where does QueryInterface come in?

... and Python

• change Py_OBHEAD around: vtable pointer first, then (opaque refcount)
• virtualize Py_INCREF(obj): obj->vtable.IncRef(obj)
• type_check(obj) -> obj->vtable.QueryInterface(type, &pUnk) [can I pass NULL in steak of pUnk, so I don't have to Release?]
• coercion -> QueryInterface()
• What does the C++ multiple-inheritance fixup stuff translate to in C?

recent finds: Don Baker's comparison