Competing for Directory Services
By Michael Floyd
Back in 1994, NeXT called them Portable Distributed Objects. Microsoft called it the Component Object Model (COM), IBM called it the System Object Model (SOM), and Apple called it OpenDoc. Later, many of these companies (except, of course, Microsoft) formed an industry consortium known as the Object Management Group, and the technologies converged to become the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).
The idea was to create an architecture that let applications plug in to an "application bus" and invoke the services of other apps. Because it was object-oriented, messages were passed to make requests, which could be serviced by specialized software components, or objects. An important feature of this pipe dream was that objects could interoperate between applications, independent of the platform on which the application ran. Of course, this dream was never fully realized.
Today, these interoperable objects have taken on new names. One is called Web Services, and is coupled with a complimentary technology called Universal Discovery Description and Integration (UDDI). Web Services let companies publish components and services in a directory that other Web applications can search. Once a company locates a suitable service, it can employ the service (presumably for a nominal fee) to perform specific tasks. Notably, many of the same players, including IBM and Microsoft, are back in the game pushing Web Services, and analysts believe that these have the potential to change the way applications (and hence, business transactions) are conducted on the Internet.<>
