With what shall we replace the DCOM communication with?

Question

We currently have a number of C++/MFC applications that communicate with each other via DCOM. Now we will update the applications and also want to replace DCOM with something more modern, something that is easier to work with. But we do not know what. What do you think

Edit

The data exchanged is not something that may be of interest to others. It is only status information between the different parts of the program running on different computers.

Answer 1

there are many C++ messaging libraries, from the old ACE to new ones like Google's Protocol Buffers or Facebook's (now Apache's) Thrift or Cisco's Etch.

Currently I'm hearing good things about ZeroMq which might give you more than you are used to.

Answer 2

DCOM is nothing more than sugar-coating over a messenging system.

Any proper messenging system would do, and would allow you to actually spot where messages are exchanged (which may be important to localize point of failures/performance bottlenecks in waiting).

There are two typical ways to do so, nowadays:

• A pure messenging system, for example using Google Protocol Buffers as the exchange format
• A webservice (either full webservice in JSON or a REST API)