>>It's always been surprising to me that other platforms didn't take advantage of the COM hosting features that Windows essentially provided to integrate with other tools - the APIs have always been public but Microsoft seems to be the only company that was using it. Interop is always a benefit to the vendors IMHO who get uptake, so it's baffling that this wasn't taken advantage of more (especially back in the day when desktop still really mattered).
>>
>>+++ Rick ---
>
>I only found one application for COM in all my years of desktop programming, and it was a weird one.
>
>This client had a label printer running off a serial port on machine A and wanted to print labels on that printer from machine B.
>At that time there was no way to share a serial port, so I wrote a DCOM app running on Machine A that was accessed by machine B.
>
>I got it to run, but the setup process was klunky. That might be why it wasn't more popular.

I'm betting you're using COM a lot more than you think. Any ActiveX controls are COM. XML - COM. Anything related to .NET (in FoxPro) - COM.

I was more talking about hosting other platforms inside of other development tools like FoxPro. For example, it's not really possible to host JavaScript or Node inside of a COM based framework (unless you use a browser) but it wouldn't be rocket science to make that possible. Likewise with Java, Python and other languages. But that just never happened. .NET works and a lot of MS tech is COM hostable, but beyond that not much.

+++ Rick ---