Background Information of Visio Editor for C2/xADL

Note: this background was written in 2000. The links are updated to reflect the situation in 2005, since many of them are no longer available. However, the content is not as comprehensive and update-to-date as it could be.

A brief history of Visio can be found from the book, Learn Visio 5.0. Here is a more comprehensive history.

Similar approach was proposed by CMU in 1997 for their UniCon(2) work, but it never showed up.

One key problem is to bridge COM and Java. There are several methods.

To call Java in COM, Sun has an ActiveX Bridge for JavaBeans, which enables JavaBeans to be used in a COM container. It also had an Enterprise Edition Client Access Services COM Bridge(Early Access version), which allows COM clients to access EJB components, but the software seems no longer available..

To call COM in Java, there are more to use. Neva has Java2COM, IBM has Bridge2Java and OLEBridge.; Dan Adler provides an open source bridge, JACOB, with some other resources about Java-COM bridge. infoZoom provides jacoZoom. Halcyon provided rJAX.

Intrinsyc's J-Integra is an innovative pure Java-COM bridge, which implements DCOM in Java. It provides both Java-to-COM and COM-to-Java capability.

Of course, Microsoft had its own solution. Microsoft Virtual Machine(Microsoft VM) can provide both Java-to-COM and COM-to-Java bridge. However, it is no longer shipped in newer versions of Windows.