Case Study --- Simplistic approach to Web enable a COM Application

A typical distributed Com app. architecture could be
Com Client --> Complus --> database

Difficulties could be
1) Methodology to be adopted.
2) Serializing the various com objects and data types like
i) Recordsets
ii) Safearray
iii)Strings
iv) Variants

The most promising methodology could be using .net webservice layer between the com server and the com client. Another layer of .NET can be introduced between the com client and the new webservice layer. This will minimize the client code changes whenever there is a chage in the protocol for communication between the client and the server.
Also explicit conversions of COM data to a serializable format can be done in this layer.

Eventually the new architecture will look like...
Com Client -->Complus mirror -->Webservice--> Complus --> database

Serializing Recordsets are something to talk about:
The different methodologies could be...
i) Persisting recordsets as xml in a Msxml dom objects, which can be serialized when represented as xmlnodes.
iii) Converting recordsets to datasets for serializing and then reconstructing the recordset thru xslt transformation.