Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Cross-process object-oriented calling.  Basically, remote procedure 
>> calls and everything you need to do it "right" instead of half-assed.
> 
> OK. So... if I actually knew how to do all this stuff, what useful 
> things could I do with it?

It's the fundamental technology that Windows parts use to talk to other 
Windows parts. You could write a program that starts up Word and Excel, 
loads a spreadsheet, clips a range out and pastes it into your Word 
document. You can take a blob of code that someone wrote to manage 
calendars, and a blob of code that someone wrote to manage email, and 
paste them together to make an email-sending reminder applciation. You 
can write components for (for example) decompressing your compressed 
movie stream, and plug them into Windows Media Player without having to 
recompile either one. It's used for everything from plug-ins, 
specialized widgets, active agents running in the background, 
distributed processing, and embedded programming languages for 
applications.

It's basically library++, "active" libraries that can run by themselves 
as independent components.

It's "component" stuff, which I don't think Linux ever really got around 
to implementing, or at least not using in any sort of consistent way.

You use it to do all the sorts of things you use IPC for (pipes, 
sockets, etc) in Linux land.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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