Overview of COM Technologies

Delphi provides wizards and classes to make it easy to implement applications based on the Component Object Model (COM) from Microsoft. With these wizards, you can create COM-based classes and components to use within applications or you can create fully functional COM clients or servers that implement COM objects, Automation servers (including Active Server Objects), ActiveX controls, or ActiveForms.

COM is a language-independent software component model that enables interaction between software components and applications running on a Windows platform. The key aspect of COM is that it enables communication between components, between applications, and between clients and servers through clearly defined interfaces. Interfaces provide a way for clients to ask a COM component which features it supports at runtime. To provide additional features for your component, you simply add an additional interface for those features.

Applications can access the interfaces of COM components that exist on the same computer as the application or that exist on another computer on the network using a mechanism called Distributed COM (DCOM). For more information on clients, servers, and interfaces see Parts of a COM Application.

COM as a specification and implementation

COM is both a specification and an implementation. The COM specification defines how objects are created and how they communicate with each other. According to this specification, COM objects can be written in different languages, run in different process spaces and on different platforms. As long as the objects adhere to the written specification, they can communicate. This allows you to integrate legacy code as a component with new components implemented in object-oriented languages.

The COM implementation is built into the Win32 subsystem, which provides a number of core services that support the written specification. The COM library contains a set of standard interfaces that define the core functionality of a COM object, and a small set of API functions designed for the purpose of creating and managing COM objects.

When you use Delphi wizards and VCL objects in your application, you are using Delphi’s implementation of the COM specification. In addition, Delphi provides some wrappers for COM services for those features that it does not implement directly. You can find these wrappers defined in the ComObj unit and the API definitions in the AxCtrls unit.

Note: Delphi’s interfaces and language follow the COM specification. Delphi implements objects conforming to the COM spec using a set of classes called the Delphi ActiveX framework (DAX). These classes are found in the AxCtrls, OleCtrls, and OleServer units. In addition, the Delphi interface to the COM API is in ActiveX.pas

and ComSvcs.pas.

COM extensions

As COM has evolved, it has been extended beyond the basic COM services. COM serves as the basis for other technologies such as Automation, ActiveX controls, and Active Directories. For details on COM extensions, see COM Extensions.

Delphi provides wizards to easily implement applications that incorporate the above technologies in the Delphi environment. For details, see Implementing COM Objects with Wizards.