Understanding COM+ (Developer Technology)

Written for the IS manager or developer, Understanding COM+ explains the details of the emerging Windows 2000 COM+ standard and the real advantages it provides for enterprise computing. Clearly written and illustrated with easy-to-understand diagrams, this title succeeds in explaining the fairly difficult "plumbing" of COM+ and its impact for the future of businesses running on the Microsoft platform.

Though it provides a good deal of technical detail, the standout feature of this book is its focus on real-world business problems in the enterprise and the solutions offered by COM+. Any IS manager or developer will be able to understand concepts like transactions, resource management, events, and asynchronous communications through the author's carefully rendered diagrams and business scenarios. There's not much actual code here, but the author does suggest techniques for designing components to take advantage of COM+.

Standout material includes a full discussion of the built-in support for transactions in COM+ and a new feature that has real potential for better performance for today's Web sites: In-Memory Databases (IMDBs). (With IMDBs, instead of optimizing code, administrators can just add more RAM to the server for a real performance boost.)

As the author notes, COM+ builds on the success of COM on the Microsoft platform. For any IS manager or programmer working on Windows, Understanding COM+ delivers a useful introduction to what's best in the new COM+ on Windows 2000. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Enterprise applications and COM+ overview, COM+ architecture and infrastructure, interception, COM+ components and catalogs, context and transactions, security, threading models and synchronization, resource management, Just-In-Time (JIT) object activation, object pooling, queued components (QC) and asynchronous communications, queue moniker, COM+ events (publishers and subscribers, COM+ In-Memory Databases [IMDBs], and load balancing).