Learning DCOM

Comforting Words

If you have read the book prior to reading this appendix, you should:

• Realize that this appendix is a summary of mostly Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, with references to important areas throughout the whole book.

• Understand the code shown throughout this appendix.

• Be able to pinpoint the spots where error handling and resource reclamation must be performed.

• Be able to pinpoint a few flaws in the code. Review Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 for some hints.

However, if you haven’t read the book, don’t expect to fully absorb all the code shown here. It is more important that you get the gist of what’s needed to develop distributed components using Distributed COM. You should study the Hello example that comes with the book, compile it, and run it to experience first hand client/server interaction for this simple distributed system. Be aware that this sample system is very general; you need the knowledge and insights of Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 in order to build real distributed applications. Don’t expect to jump up and develop distributed applications using Distributed COM at this point, because you need much more information than a short appendix like this can supply.

And yes! What’s shown in the last few sections for creating this simply distributed system is definitely a lot of code, especially when you are comparing it with the original Kernighan and Ritchie example, which goes something like this:

void main() { printf("Hello, World!\n"); ...