Short for Distributed Component Object Model, an extension of the Component Object Model (COM) that allows COM components to communicate across network boundaries. Traditional COM components can only perform interprocess communication across process boundaries on the same machine. DCOM uses the RPC mechanism to transparently send and receive information between COM components (i.e., clients and servers) on the same network. DCOM was first made available in 1995 with the initial release of Windows NT 4.
DCOM serves the same purpose as IBM’s DSOM protocol, which is the most popular implementation of CORBA. Unlike CORBA, which runs on many operating systems, DCOM is currently implemented only for Windows.
