Re: ANNOUNCE: Free-NET

["Juergen Pfeifer" <juergen.pfeifer@gmx.net>]

> Well, there is Bonobo. Check out
> http://www.helixcode.com/tech/bonobo.php3 . It says its related to GNOME
> somehow, so I'm not sure if GNOME is required to use it or not. It does
> look like it requires GTK+ though.
>
Which sounds strange! What has an component model to do with a graphics
library? Sometimes people gets confused between OLE and COM. COM is
the component model and has actually nothing to do with Windows. It has
been submitted as RFC proposal to the IETF and there exist implementations
on a variety of UNIXes and even on the OS/390 Mainframe. These ports
are not free, maybe that's the reason why they are not widely known and
used. OLE is an COM class library dealing with compound document
technology (inplace editing of document objects, embedding- and linking
of document objects, structured document storage etc.). This has some
relations to Graphical stuff (editing) and is therefor Windows specific.
It has later been renamed into ActiveX.

Actually ActiveX (OLE) is whats application developers attracts. Simply
embedding a browser window or an Excel spreadsheet or whatever is
available as OLE component into your app is so easy and has no parallel
in the UNIX world.

If you compare CORBA to COM, the OLE pendant would have been
OpenDoc and I'm still a bit astonished that all the now converted
Open Source companies didn't consider to push OpenDoc to become
Open Source. Instead people reinvented the wheel and created
KParts and Bonobo whose functionality overlaps with OpenDoc.

J�rgen