- From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 13:45:56 -0500
- To: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@beach.w3.org>
- Cc: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>, Kay Winkler <K.Winkler@gsi.de>, www-html@w3.org, opendoc-interest@cil.org, carmine@mangione.com, david@cilabs.org
At 12:18 AM 3/14/96 -0500, Daniel W. Connolly wrote: >"head and shoulders above"? I've heard this claim, but I'm still looking >for hard evidence to back it. I based my statement on two things: my experience with SOM, which, to me is very simple because it encapuslates tried-and-true OO paradigms such as inheritance, dynamic binding, etc. vs. COM, which seems (to me) kinda like the inside of a C++ runtime. I've also seen OpenDoc (and SOM) perform really quickly and I've only ever seen OLE drag my machine to its knees. The other standard OpenDoc features are multiple active objects, irregular frames, well-defined UI guidelines, explicit differentiation between "viewer" and "editor", source code availability, CORBA compliance, language independence (due to SOM), multi-page objects and an easy transition to a distributed object model (perhaps exaggerated). Microsoft has announced counterparts to some of those features, and might have delivered on them by now. It's hard to remember what products Microsoft is actually shipping and what is only a press release. Here's some references for more comprehensive comparisons. The first two are from Mac magazines, but they seem quite even handed. No, this isn't an informational RFC, and I don't think I'm the right person to write one. --- An old, but quite comprehensive article: http://web.xplain.com/mactech.com/Articles/Vol.10/10.08/OpenDoc-vs-OLE.bhtml For the record: I think this article is a little outdated in its view of SOM. Using SOM a couple of years ago was like C++ 10 years ago...you had to do a lot by hand because your tools didn't know what the hell was going on. This article was written in that period. SOM and C++ have become a lot more integrated since this article was written. Even so, the last time I used SOM was in the era of this article, and I found it flexible, powerful and easy to use. --- Another fairly comprehensive article: http://www.macworld.com/password/pages/november.94/Feature.985.html ---- IBM's View: http://www.software.ibm.com/clubopendoc/odvsole.html Biased, of course. --- Microsoft's View: I can't find anything on Microsoft's Web site. Maybe someone else can point me to information representing their side of the story. Paul Prescod
Received on Thursday, 14 March 1996 13:47:18 UTC