Bentley Systems Inc, Exton, Pennsylvania is working on an object-oriented version of its MicroStation computer-aided design software called Objective MicroStation, written in Objective C. It will form the core of all MicroStation products once it is ready, but the project is expected to take more than a year. Developers will get to see initial beta releases late this year, users get a beta version early in 1996 and final release is scheduled for near the end of next year. Objective MicroStation will take the characteristics and behaviour of components designed using MicroStation and store them as re-usable objects. Users will be able to mix and match MicroStation and Objective MicroStation components, the company says. It is adding an overlay schema that will provide access to version 5 of MicroStation’s DGN design file format database from Objective MicroStation, and in subsequent releases will move the file system format over to an object architecture. It plans to support the major object-oriented databases. The major advantage for developers, Bentley says, is that objects can encapsulate all of the information associated with a design component, including all changes and histories. Bentley is adding an Objective C extension to its own MicroStation C compiler and, although users can choose to configure other third-party compilers instead, both inheritance and class structure and hierarchy must be defined in Objective MDL, the object version of the MicroStation MDL modelling language. Users will be able to construct computer-aided design software in MicroStation MDL, Objective MDL or Visual Basic, C++ and Objective C. Objective MicroStation will be Object Linking & Embedding/Common Object Model-enabled and Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant, handling processes via external application programming interfaces; a version with default interfaces for Object Linking and Common Object Model will be available initially. With Autodesk Inc and Intergraph Corp betting on Object Linking-Common Object Model, Bentley reckons the Object Request Broker play will keep its Unix ahead of the pack; it claims one third of its 180,000 users are attached to Unix – around 45,000 of them Intergraph users. Objective MicroStation will be up on all currently supported systems, including Unix, NT and Macintosh. Bentley says sales have tripled since it took over the marketing of MicroStation from Intergraph: compared with the first three months of 1994, its unit sales of MicroStation have surged by more than 50%. The privately-held company, in which Intergraph still has a 50% stake, did not reveal exact numbers for the first quarter of 1995 and noted only that in 1994, with Intergraph handling sales, company revenue approached the $100m mark. Intergraph turned MicroStation sales and marketing over to Bentley, which had previously simply developed the thing, on January 1. Bentley said that sales to Intergraph, the largest of its 500 MicroStation distributors, doubled compared with a year earlier.
