Using Microsoft's Jview JVM COM-Java integration (this is like '98 time frame) you could more easily run VB 6 apps against Java application servers because you only needed to distribute the client jar to the VB app. Since there was no early binding you didn't need the code you were going to call remotely on the client, it could just download the classes at runtime and use reflection to make the required calls. Drastically reduced any sort of jar/dll hell.