Business Glossary

Microsoft's architecture for building software components (i.e., packages of procedures and data structures ready for use by programmers). Many of these components are referred to as ActiveX controls (see ActiveX ).

COM was introduced in the mid-1990s and provides infrastructure for OLE (Object Linking and Embedding; see OLE ). COM components can be written in any major programming language. They can be used by the program to which they belong, other programs running concurrently on the same computer, or even programs running elsewhere and communicating through a network; the last of these is called DCOM (Distributed COM; compare CORBA). Though developed forWindows, COM has been ported to UNIX.

COM+ is an extended form of COM in which more of the creation and handling of components is done automatically. The .NET Framework takes the same idea even further see( .NET Framework ).