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The primary goal of this specification is to allow effective access to CORBA servers through DCOM and the reverse. To reduce
the total cost of ownership of CORBA applications that are built with COM or Automation clients for CORBA servers, COM or
Automation clients on machines with no ORB or interworking mechanism should be able to act as clients to CORBA servers through
DCOM. In addition, a CORBA client could, through a CORBA view, access a DCOM server that is not co-located with the view with
no additional interworking support on the DCOM server’s machine. These scenarios help to reduce installation and maintenance
costs through the lifetime of applications, which span multiple object systems.
Note – This specification refers to COM/CORBA Part A and COM/CORBA Part B. The Interworking Architecture, Mapping: COM and
CORBA, and Mapping Automation and CORBA chapters comprise the COM/CORBA Part A and this specification comprises the COM/CORBA
Part B.
Converting a COM or Automation client to contact a server through DCOM is relatively easy and requires no application changes
to the server. Thus, applications that use existing Part A compliant solutions could, today, have remote DCOM clients access
the COM or Automation views of the CORBA servers and CORBA clients could access (through a view) DCOM or DCOM Automation servers.
However, allowing CORBA access to CORBA views that are not co-located with the COM or Automation servers or allowing DCOM
access to remote views of CORBA servers introduces a number of issues in terms of performance and scalability that will be
discussed below.