com dcom and mts...help

[Ralph Carrasquillo]

Hello - I'm a little bit confused. We are in the process of trying to set
up COM objs. that could be reused for both InterDev apps running on our intranet
and regular clent VB apps.. Our users number is probably somewhere around
100 (actaully more like 50). I was thinking DCOM but it seems that we may
try to use MTS. Is this added complexity that may not be required based on
our user number? From my understanding one of the advantages of MTS is workload
distribution. I must admit I dont know anything (YET) about MTS. Do you need
to develope on an NT system? And if you do, do your users need to be running
NT to be ensure 100% compatibility? Right now we are running on 95 and so
are our users.

Thanks for any input on the subject...
Ralph C. -

[Michael Egbert]

Ralph,
It depends on what you want to do with the objects. If you are using multiple
client applications that each need seperate objects created from the your
server objects, then MTS is probably a good idea. But you really need to
think about how the objects are going to share data between each other.
The way you would design an object in a regular application will add tremendous
network overhead to your apps. Also MTS security is not enabled on 95 -
NT only. The load balancing that you would need with 50 to 100 users depends
on the concurrency of users (how many clients are calling servers AT THE
SAME EXACT TIME). The number of concurrent users on your system is probably
much smaller than you think, (like 5, maybe!)

If you are planning on going through a proxy server be aware that DCOM must
be configured for this and it is not easy.

I would reccomend Ted Pattisons book "Programming Distributed Applications
with COM and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0". All of the answers to your questions
are contained in that book, really, I'm not kidding.

The road to COM and MTS is not an easy one, but you will be able to write
better performing, more scalable and extensible software when you do take
that route.

Good Luck,
Michael





"Ralph Carrasquillo" <Ralph_Carrasquillo@ninewest.com> wrote:
>
>Hello - I'm a little bit confused. We are in the process of trying to set
>up COM objs. that could be reused for both InterDev apps running on our
intranet
>and regular clent VB apps.. Our users number is probably somewhere around
>100 (actaully more like 50). I was thinking DCOM but it seems that we may
>try to use MTS. Is this added complexity that may not be required based
on
>our user number? From my understanding one of the advantages of MTS is workload
>distribution. I must admit I dont know anything (YET) about MTS. Do you
need
>to develope on an NT system? And if you do, do your users need to be running
>NT to be ensure 100% compatibility? Right now we are running on 95 and so
>are our users.
>
>Thanks for any input on the subject...
>Ralph C. -