At last week’s Object World show in Boston, Massachusetts, NeXT Computer Inc introduced version 2.0 of the PDO Portable Distributed Objects Framework 2.0 for NeXTstep and announced that it will be up under SunSoft Inc Solaris by the end of the year. The Portable Distributed Objects development which was unveiled last year with co-developer Hewlett-Packard Co is already shipping under Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX Unix operating system. NeXT says Portable Distributed Objects is a distributed object framework that allows objects built in NeXTstep or Unix environments to reside in each other’s client-server systems, by incorporating the same object model and messaging services used in the NeXTstep operating system. The new release integrates a new C++ compiler with the firm’s existing Objective C compiler. This will allow developers to merge Objective C, C++ and ANSI C code into one application automatically. Other features include the inclusion of the GNU make program. According to NeXT this allows developers to have a single set of makefiles irrespective of which operating system or Portable Distributed Objects versions used. Both the compiler and the GNU compiler will be available for NeXTstep, HP-UX and SunOS. The deal with SunSoft to provide native support for SunOS, and later Solaris, to Portable Distributed Objects is another condition of Sun’s equity agreement signed in November. Portable Distributed Objects is, according to NeXT, a stepping stone technology to OpenStep that will enable Solaris users to begin to develop and deploy OpenStep compliant objects now before official application programming interfaces become available in June this year.
