A key goal of any component software architecture is to separate business logic, for example, how a tax component calculates tax rates, from execution logic, for example, whether the tax component runs in a browser or on a multiprocessor server. DCOM extends this separation even further, because the same components can communicate with each other across processes in a single machine or across the Internet via HTTP.
However, components by themselves do not solve all of the issues of enterprise application complexity.
For example, a business wants to rapidly build and deploy a customer order entry application that involves five different areas of functionality—tax calculation, customer credit verification, inventory management, warranty update, and order entry. The application is built from five separate components and operates on a Web server with access via a browser. How does the developer handle exceptions? System failures? Network outages? Peaks in performance load?
It defeats the two main goals of component-based development, fast time-to-market and lower development costs, if companies are forced to "hand-code" into their component applications the mission critical services that are required for online production systems.
To address the enterprise requirements for a distributed component architecture, without sacrificing rapid development and cost effectiveness, Microsoft is integrating DCOM into the ActiveX Server, a series of technology services that speed deployment of component-based applications across the Internet and corporate intranets. Some of the ActiveX Server Framework services include:
The ActiveX Server technologies will be built using publicly available Internet protocols and will begin to appear in 1996.