We have develped a framework based on a three-tier architecture which exchanges infomration between the presentation layer and the business layer with XML.

As it is a tiered architecture and communication is already using XML, I am trying to find out if we could expose the com objects in the business layer as Webservices, and thereby create a distributed application.

Has anyone actually done anything like this on a commercial scale? What would the performance be? Is what I am conceiving practical?

I have a further conceptual problem that I would be happy to hear some views on. I am using a business manager class (similar that Markus Egger suggests in his book on OOP) that has published interfaces that you call and the class gives you a pointer to the actual object you want to manipulate. These objects are not OLEPUBLIC, so you cannot access them except through the business manager class.

I cannot directly return an object as a data type through webservices, so what ideas do you have for going around this? It would be possible to create one small component for every object that exposes the appropriate interface, which then calls the business manager. That would make a whole lot of components though, for a large system.

Any ideas would be welcome.

Thanks a lot.

Steven