Perhaps it’s because analysts displayed only lukewarm interest in the company’s now five-year-old technology development effort that SunSoft Inc canned a worldwide satellite conference and instead called a hastily-convened breakfast in New York during Unix Expo last week to wheel out Neo, the object environment formerly known as Project Distributed Objects Everywhere. The event was squashed in before the main event of the day – another quickly arranged affair – Novell Inc’s unloading of its Unix burden. The initial release of Neo – no, not Networked Enterprise Objects, not anything specifical at all, the company said – including the Object Group services, object management and the object request broker formerly known as Prelude, is out next month. The OpenStep run-time environment, development tools and NeXTstep graphical user interface – now called NeoDesktop – will go into beta test next quarter and ship by mid-1996, the company promised. Solaris Neo is the standard Solaris operating system extended to supp ort Neo applications and will include OpenStep and NeoDesktop with its cluster of applets. SunSoft’s own NeoNet object request broker – previously unnamed – is available now and includes interoperability with the Iona Technologies Ltd’s Orbix object request broker, which can generate Common Object Request Broker Architecture objects from Object Linking & Embedding-Windows environments, and Object Management Group Corba Services. NeoShare is a networking system that finds, manages and shares object services. There are additional tools for managing Common Object Request Broker Architecture objects themselves, which SunSoft object chief, Bud Tribble, believes are a unique capability. Common Object Request Broker management will plug into Sun’s Solstice enterpri se network management just as Simple Network Management Protocol and GDMO Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects modules do already. Embedded into Solaris Neo, Object Design Inc’s database provides persistence. WorkShop Neo for development includes the Object C-based OpenStep developer for creating three-tier applications from re-built, re-usable objects. It will appear by mid-1996. NeoWorks is a suite of tools to create Common Object Request Broker Architecture applications, including an Interface Definition Language compiler and object development facility rapid application development tools. SunSoft calls them Network Object Constructor, Debugger and NeoShare network development framework.
Object C parsing
SparcWorks includes the browser, configuration and management tools. SunSoft said it has added Object C parsing to its C++ compiler, meaning that users don’t have to switch C++ compilers, though it doesn’t support full mix-and-match Objective C and C++ on a statement-by-statement basis. Relational database-to-C++ (object) links that work with Project Distributed Objects Everywhere are available from Persistence Software Inc, San Mateo, California, and the company is now working with SunSoft on a relational-to-Interface Definition Language mapping link for use with non-C++ languages, including Smalltalk and Java. SunSoft will sell the link with Neo from the first quarter of next year. Solaris Neo 1.0, with NeoNet, NeoShare and Solstice administration tools costs from $1,000. WorkShop Neo 1.0 – NeoWorks, SparcWorks and Sparc compilers (minus OpenStep developer) is priced from $12,000 ($6,000 for a limited promotional period).
