A good while back Esri rearchitected their whole software suite into a COM based technology known as ArcObjects, with the aim of providing developers a single e

A good while back Esri rearchitected their whole software suite into a COM based technology known as ArcObjects, with the aim of providing developers a single environment in which to code across all Esri SDKs. I remember a couple of things about it: firstly it was reputedly the largest COM library in existence, and secondly it was so horrendous that hardly anyone used it. Don't even get me started on the Java wrappers for ArcObjects... Thank god things have moved on.