5 ms·

Object Linking and Embedding

39 points by fidotron 3y ago

devbent 3y ago
I remember back in the 90s being able to paste a file from, iirc, Corel Draw, into MS word, click on it, and the full set of drawing tools showed up. OLE was the opposite of silod apps. It was also a serious resource hog and that above bit of magic involves my disk thrashing and nearly a minute of waiting for things to happen. (I suspect I didn't have enough ram for both a photo editor and MS word!) Still though, cool idea.
- abraxas 3y ago
  Bill Gates dreamed up creating a single program that would allow you to create content regardless of whether you wanted a document a presentation or a spreadsheet. The office app was to be merged into a single unified app from which all kinds of content could be created and mixed/matched in a single file. A pretty useless idea if you ask me but Microsoft somehow believed it would be revolutionary. My source for this is a book on OLE that I read in the early nineties so I can't provide the exact quotes as I no longer even remember its title. When that did not work (technically as well as commercially) and the internet was threatening to relegate Microsoft and its software to irrelevance they rebranded OLE as ActiveX and attempted a frontal assault on the opennes of the Web through the Internet Explorer browser and the proprietary ActiveX controls. Luckily for us the thing was full of security holes and more or less blew up in Microsoft's face as a bit of a PR disaster. And that's kids how the web was saved from the first corporitization attempt.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    I was told at the time (but I have no clue if it's true or not; it sounded plausible), that the dream was that companies/users could just roll their own applications from OLE components. So if your company workflow for some of the staff would require Word + Excel + Photoshop working in some way together, you would add these 3 to an empty application, hook them up with VBA (which was already included with the empty application) and then write it to an installer. The file format out/in would indeed combine these 3. It still sounds plausible when I write it. And not a bad idea (besides maybe the fileformat, unless you can easily untangle maybe).
    - tsujamin 3y ago
      The file format exists, its Compound Document Files which are effectively just a little FAT filesystem in a file from memory. both Microsoft and 3rd parties (...Autodesk maybe?) use them. My favourite example of seeing them is VBA macro projects in office documents. The macros used to be stored in CDFs equivalent of a subfolder within a wider Word CDF document. When Office 2007 migrated from .doc to .docx, they just made the VBA project folder its own CDF file and stuck it in the new zip archive format
    - pjc50 2y ago
      > that the dream was that companies/users could just roll their own applications from OLE components Since at least the 70s there has been a dream of the software industry that it could be more like the electronics industry: you purchase a set of components and assemble them into something that does what you want. This has never quite worked out like that. It always develops its own unique pathologies, like npm's sprawling software BOMs of hundreds of thousands of libraries.
      - anonzzzies 2y ago
        Yes, and we keep trying!
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    > Bill Gates dreamed up... This idea was ubiquitous in the 90s, only comparable to the AI hype today. All software was going to be written as components which could be combined and embedded into applications. It wasn't just Microsoft with OLE, the other behemoth was CORBA driven by IBM. Eventually the web browser absorbed and leapfrogged the whole idea (despite, as you mention, the best attempts of the 'establishment' to kill the web).
andrewstuart 3y ago
Please, I'm still not over the trauma.
- julian_t 3y ago
  Is there some sort of survivors' club? The hours spent trawling through "Inside OLE" while trying to get the dam' thing to work...
  - rlkf 3y ago
    I think this book may be recommended reading: https://amazon.com/dp/1565893182 https://amazon.com/dp/1565893182
mike_hearn 3y ago
OLE and OpenDoc feel a bit nostalgic because they were the last time anyone tried to really rethink the desktop paradigm (and therefore computing productivity), spinning it away from a machine-oriented "app" mindset towards a data-oriented "doc" mindset. The idea of everything revolving around apps is in some ways a bit odd, if you think about it. App is short for application, and we call apps apps because in the earliest days of computers the most common question was "but what are they good for?". Well, here's an application of computers: running the numbers. Here's another application for computers: writing letters. Etc. If you think in terms of justifying expensive machines, then making everything revolve around individual "apps" makes sense, but once you're beyond that and think in terms of productivity workflows an app-oriented makes less sense. Computers are not about abstract applications of the tech, they're about produced work artifacts, which we can generically call compound documents, and those may be rich multi-media affairs with many different kinds of program contributing to the final experience. At least, this was the OLE/OpenDoc argument. Things didn't work out that way but it's worth asking if that was due to implementation deficiencies or because the actual vision was bad. Primary evidence in the case against OLE-style compound documents is that it's gone out of fashion and is hardly used anymore outside of office suites, and only hardly even there. Users don't seem to care and aren't asking for it back. Primary evidence in the case for compound documents is the web. Web pages are arguably very similar to OLE style documents, but less engineered and without the ability to edit them. Nonetheless, the <iframe> or <object> tag is roughly similar to OLE's IOleInPlaceSite [1]. In earlier versions of Internet Explorer the <object> tag could in fact embed OLE objects, they are so conceptually similar. URLs are similar to "monikers", XML+XSLT had similar goals to OLE's structured storage (what OpenDoc called Bento) and so on. I guess the critical difference is that the developer usability of the web is much higher. OLE/COM were the product of C++ architecture astronauts who didn't seem to care much about developer usability. Writing OLE components was a horrifically difficult experience even if you were using Borland's tools instead of Microsoft's. Writing web pages was easy. OpenDoc was the ultimate expression of compound document purism. In OLE apps could embed other apps, but in OpenDoc there were no apps. Everything started with a blank generic document into which you embedded components and tied them together. Pre-made document templates were available that could approximate apps but they were always editable. It was a highly fungible and malleable computing environment, somewhat similar maybe to Squeak. Jobs was right to kill it though. Apple needed to focus on shipping a good implementation of a proven paradigm at that point in its history, not trying to reinvent the basics. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleidl/nn-oleidl-ioleinplacesite https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleidl/n...
anonzzzies 3y ago
Bad memories working with Delphi + OLE.
killerstorm 3y ago
20 years ago I made an ActiveX component which can show an interactive 3D scene in any Office app or in the browser. I was able to make in just a few weeks. ... It is currently impossible to use full MS Office to edit documents which exist within Teams. You can only use a web-based version of Office apps (which don't have same capabilities, same UI, etc.). Sad. It's like nobody gives a fuck about user experience anymore... What's the selling point of Windows? They made all these frameworks, Office, communication software like Teams, One Drive, etc. It is supposed to all work together. But it just doesn't. Might as well use Linux where each app is on its own.
layer8 3y ago
It’s ironic that in the era of the hyperlinked world wide web, we are farther than ever from that vision of linkable and embeddable software components and application interoperability.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  Excuse me jumping on the hype train for a bit, but in a way the web and wasm is just that. For instance I was able to embed my emulators (written in C and C++), compiled to WASM, and an old assembler cmdline tool written in the 1990's in C89 compiled to WASI, and integrate those as 'components' into Visual Studio Code: https://floooh.github.io/2023/12/31/vscode-wasm-wasi.html https://floooh.github.io/2023/12/31/vscode-wasm-wasi.html That same WASM blob would run without recompilation in any environment which provides a WASM runner and a subset of web APIs (mainly WebGL and WebAudio), and the emulator WASI blob runs out of the box in any WASI runner.
flohofwoe 3y ago
Arguably the only good and still relevant part of OLE is COM by way of providing a stable C-ABI-tunnel for versioned C++ APIs in Windows system DLLs (but also trivially mappable to other language bindings like C# or Rust), e.g. it's the stable and backward compatible C++ ABI that C++ compilers never were able to agree on ;) Most COM APIs are quite painful to work with, but in many cases that's just bad API design (the D3D APIs show that it can also be a lot less painful).
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I have some tiny hope that if the new security mandate is anything beyond marketing, we finally slowly move away from COM in Windows. Or at very least, all those scenarios where currently only in-proc COM in C++ is allowed, turn into external COM in whatever-you-fancy scenario.
PeterStuer 2y ago
OLE as implemented in compound documents might have been a nightmare, but later generations of COM weren't half bad and led to the arguably very nice .Net platform.
chasemiller 2y ago
OLEs were a phisher's dream
fl0ki 2y ago
When I started out self-teaching programming on Windows with Visual Studio, in high school long before university, my greatest fear is that I might one day have to understand COM, OLE, and ActiveX. Luckily some friends had already taken an interest in Linux and BSD, radicalizing me in that direction instead. I made a whole career writing backend services for datacenters and still couldn't tell you the first thing about OLE.

39 points by fidotron 3y ago

I remember back in the 90s being able to paste a file from, iirc, Corel Draw, into MS word, click on it, and the full set of drawing tools showed up. OLE was the opposite of silod apps. It was also a serious resource hog and that above bit of magic involves my disk thrashing and nearly a minute of waiting for things to happen. (I suspect I didn't have enough ram for both a photo editor and MS word!) Still though, cool idea.

abraxas 3y ago
Bill Gates dreamed up creating a single program that would allow you to create content regardless of whether you wanted a document a presentation or a spreadsheet. The office app was to be merged into a single unified app from which all kinds of content could be created and mixed/matched in a single file. A pretty useless idea if you ask me but Microsoft somehow believed it would be revolutionary. My source for this is a book on OLE that I read in the early nineties so I can't provide the exact quotes as I no longer even remember its title. When that did not work (technically as well as commercially) and the internet was threatening to relegate Microsoft and its software to irrelevance they rebranded OLE as ActiveX and attempted a frontal assault on the opennes of the Web through the Internet Explorer browser and the proprietary ActiveX controls. Luckily for us the thing was full of security holes and more or less blew up in Microsoft's face as a bit of a PR disaster. And that's kids how the web was saved from the first corporitization attempt.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  I was told at the time (but I have no clue if it's true or not; it sounded plausible), that the dream was that companies/users could just roll their own applications from OLE components. So if your company workflow for some of the staff would require Word + Excel + Photoshop working in some way together, you would add these 3 to an empty application, hook them up with VBA (which was already included with the empty application) and then write it to an installer. The file format out/in would indeed combine these 3. It still sounds plausible when I write it. And not a bad idea (besides maybe the fileformat, unless you can easily untangle maybe).
  - tsujamin 3y ago
    The file format exists, its Compound Document Files which are effectively just a little FAT filesystem in a file from memory. both Microsoft and 3rd parties (...Autodesk maybe?) use them. My favourite example of seeing them is VBA macro projects in office documents. The macros used to be stored in CDFs equivalent of a subfolder within a wider Word CDF document. When Office 2007 migrated from .doc to .docx, they just made the VBA project folder its own CDF file and stuck it in the new zip archive format
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > that the dream was that companies/users could just roll their own applications from OLE components Since at least the 70s there has been a dream of the software industry that it could be more like the electronics industry: you purchase a set of components and assemble them into something that does what you want. This has never quite worked out like that. It always develops its own unique pathologies, like npm's sprawling software BOMs of hundreds of thousands of libraries.
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      Yes, and we keep trying!
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  > Bill Gates dreamed up... This idea was ubiquitous in the 90s, only comparable to the AI hype today. All software was going to be written as components which could be combined and embedded into applications. It wasn't just Microsoft with OLE, the other behemoth was CORBA driven by IBM. Eventually the web browser absorbed and leapfrogged the whole idea (despite, as you mention, the best attempts of the 'establishment' to kill the web).

andrewstuart 3y ago

Please, I'm still not over the trauma.

julian_t 3y ago
Is there some sort of survivors' club? The hours spent trawling through "Inside OLE" while trying to get the dam' thing to work...
- rlkf 3y ago
  I think this book may be recommended reading: https://amazon.com/dp/1565893182 https://amazon.com/dp/1565893182

mike_hearn 3y ago

OLE and OpenDoc feel a bit nostalgic because they were the last time anyone tried to really rethink the desktop paradigm (and therefore computing productivity), spinning it away from a machine-oriented "app" mindset towards a data-oriented "doc" mindset. The idea of everything revolving around apps is in some ways a bit odd, if you think about it. App is short for application, and we call apps apps because in the earliest days of computers the most common question was "but what are they good for?". Well, here's an application of computers: running the numbers. Here's another application for computers: writing letters. Etc. If you think in terms of justifying expensive machines, then making everything revolve around individual "apps" makes sense, but once you're beyond that and think in terms of productivity workflows an app-oriented makes less sense. Computers are not about abstract applications of the tech, they're about produced work artifacts, which we can generically call compound documents, and those may be rich multi-media affairs with many different kinds of program contributing to the final experience. At least, this was the OLE/OpenDoc argument. Things didn't work out that way but it's worth asking if that was due to implementation deficiencies or because the actual vision was bad. Primary evidence in the case against OLE-style compound documents is that it's gone out of fashion and is hardly used anymore outside of office suites, and only hardly even there. Users don't seem to care and aren't asking for it back. Primary evidence in the case for compound documents is the web. Web pages are arguably very similar to OLE style documents, but less engineered and without the ability to edit them. Nonetheless, the <iframe> or <object> tag is roughly similar to OLE's IOleInPlaceSite [1]. In earlier versions of Internet Explorer the <object> tag could in fact embed OLE objects, they are so conceptually similar. URLs are similar to "monikers", XML+XSLT had similar goals to OLE's structured storage (what OpenDoc called Bento) and so on. I guess the critical difference is that the developer usability of the web is much higher. OLE/COM were the product of C++ architecture astronauts who didn't seem to care much about developer usability. Writing OLE components was a horrifically difficult experience even if you were using Borland's tools instead of Microsoft's. Writing web pages was easy. OpenDoc was the ultimate expression of compound document purism. In OLE apps could embed other apps, but in OpenDoc there were no apps. Everything started with a blank generic document into which you embedded components and tied them together. Pre-made document templates were available that could approximate apps but they were always editable. It was a highly fungible and malleable computing environment, somewhat similar maybe to Squeak. Jobs was right to kill it though. Apple needed to focus on shipping a good implementation of a proven paradigm at that point in its history, not trying to reinvent the basics. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleidl/nn-oleidl-ioleinplacesite https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleidl/n...

anonzzzies 3y ago

Bad memories working with Delphi + OLE.

killerstorm 3y ago

20 years ago I made an ActiveX component which can show an interactive 3D scene in any Office app or in the browser. I was able to make in just a few weeks. ... It is currently impossible to use full MS Office to edit documents which exist within Teams. You can only use a web-based version of Office apps (which don't have same capabilities, same UI, etc.). Sad. It's like nobody gives a fuck about user experience anymore... What's the selling point of Windows? They made all these frameworks, Office, communication software like Teams, One Drive, etc. It is supposed to all work together. But it just doesn't. Might as well use Linux where each app is on its own.

layer8 3y ago

It’s ironic that in the era of the hyperlinked world wide web, we are farther than ever from that vision of linkable and embeddable software components and application interoperability.

flohofwoe 2y ago
Excuse me jumping on the hype train for a bit, but in a way the web and wasm is just that. For instance I was able to embed my emulators (written in C and C++), compiled to WASM, and an old assembler cmdline tool written in the 1990's in C89 compiled to WASI, and integrate those as 'components' into Visual Studio Code: https://floooh.github.io/2023/12/31/vscode-wasm-wasi.html https://floooh.github.io/2023/12/31/vscode-wasm-wasi.html That same WASM blob would run without recompilation in any environment which provides a WASM runner and a subset of web APIs (mainly WebGL and WebAudio), and the emulator WASI blob runs out of the box in any WASI runner.

flohofwoe 3y ago

Arguably the only good and still relevant part of OLE is COM by way of providing a stable C-ABI-tunnel for versioned C++ APIs in Windows system DLLs (but also trivially mappable to other language bindings like C# or Rust), e.g. it's the stable and backward compatible C++ ABI that C++ compilers never were able to agree on ;) Most COM APIs are quite painful to work with, but in many cases that's just bad API design (the D3D APIs show that it can also be a lot less painful).

pjmlp 2y ago
I have some tiny hope that if the new security mandate is anything beyond marketing, we finally slowly move away from COM in Windows. Or at very least, all those scenarios where currently only in-proc COM in C++ is allowed, turn into external COM in whatever-you-fancy scenario.

PeterStuer 2y ago

OLE as implemented in compound documents might have been a nightmare, but later generations of COM weren't half bad and led to the arguably very nice .Net platform.

chasemiller 2y ago

OLEs were a phisher's dream

fl0ki 2y ago

When I started out self-teaching programming on Windows with Visual Studio, in high school long before university, my greatest fear is that I might one day have to understand COM, OLE, and ActiveX. Luckily some friends had already taken an interest in Linux and BSD, radicalizing me in that direction instead. I made a whole career writing backend services for datacenters and still couldn't tell you the first thing about OLE.