Developers will be able to create applications using any combination of remote services, local services and custom code. These services can be combined. Any application using any language for any platform can use a service, Montgomery explained. One example is a language translation service. You can take something like the Lernout and Hauspie translation engine, which lives on the Web, and build it into an email program to get a simple translation.
Users can then send and receive email in foreign languages.
These components can perform any task, from a single function to an entire application, such as Microsoft Word, he explained. Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of ActiveState, a company that offers tools and services to work with the Perl and Python Internet programming languages, began programming with Windows 1.03. He's seen programming change over the past 14 years. When COM was introduced, there was some interoperability between a few languages. Today, interoperability is challenging and entails significant overhead.