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July 6, 1998

TechView:
Productivity Is The Object

he enterprise software and middleware industry spends a healthy amount of energy debating the relative merits of object models and component architectures. Lately, the debate has come down to two major camps: Microsoft and its minions rally around the COM architecture, while a sizable part of the rest of the industry is preaching the virtues of an architecture based on the Object Management Group's Corba.

The question is whether anyone other than the vendors really cares about this debate, or whether the participants are having delusions of grandeur. Under current conditions, the debate seems like a waste of oxygen.

There's a simple explanation for this-right now, those of us who have to actually work with technology to solve problems are more focused on being productive than on what the underlying technology is. Architecture seems to be the furthest thing from most IT professionals' mind right now-their plates are too full with other concerns, like year 2000 problems and demand for Web applications.

And it's not as if an emphasis on architecture would buy anyone any additional productivity right now. Religious dedication to one or the other doesn't particularly lend itself to quick solutions to enterprisewide problems. Both Corba and COM have their shortcomings-for example, the absence of a common implementation of Corba, and the limited manageability and scalability in COM.

There are other problems with neat compartmentalization of this debate. Even though Corba is the richer of the two architectures, it is also the slower-moving of the two. Microsoft can issue a new specification for its architecture to adapt to new technologies once a week if it wants to-and sometimes, that seems to be the case.

Corba is driven by approval committees, and some parts of its functionality progress faster than others. The result may be that Corba goes the way of ODI in the networking world, with the most useful pieces-such as IIOP and some of Corba's brokering services-outlasting the standard itself.

Microsoft's architecture clearly isn't a single best answer either. While Microsoft has brought COM along quickly, the Distributed interNet Application "architecture" is still a year or two away from providing even a majority of the pieces required of the solution.

In the interim, anyone seeking to build large, complex applications will end up having to rely upon a piece of this, a piece of that, and some vendor's proprietary implementation of both in order to get any solution out the door quickly. That doesn't make for pretty IT, and it's not exactly a long-term strategy for success. But who thinks long-term these days anyway? Let's just get past next year first.

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