Re: OpenDoc [was: Plug-In Spec ]

On Thu, 14 Mar 1996 13:45:56 -0500 you wrote:

>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
>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.
>
Paul, I am impressed.  You did forget to mention several Direct-to-SOM compilers
which take C++ code, ask some IDL questions, and produce SOM objects.  Quite
nice.  It is important to note that this will only work if the code is completly
OO in design.

Microsoft's side can be found in their COM Spec which is available from 
their web site.  If you look on their Developers Connection there
are some really old articles that discuss OLE vs OpenDoc.  They received
so much flak after those articles, they seem to have stopped comparing the
two.  It really is like comparing apples and oranges.  They were designed
to do completly different tasks and show it.

Look at the period of time and the goals of the teams that created them and
you will then understand their differences.  Each does as each was intended.
OLE is not an OpenDoc and can never be.

Carmine

Received on Thursday, 14 March 1996 14:35:54 UTC