Hewlett-Packard Co says that within two to three years it should be ready with an object environment known internally as ORB-Plus. It will comprise a CORBA-compliant object request broker written in C and C++ that is similar to its existing Distributed Object Management Facility system except it is based on Distributed Computing Environment protocols. A layer of basic object services will sit on top of the Distributed Object Management Facility to deal with functions such as naming and lifecycle. On top of these will sit two further sets of higher-level frameworks: the first will come from Taligent Inc and be written in C++; the second are derived from Hewlett-Packard’s Distributed Smalltalk environment. This currently consists of a Smalltalk implementation of the Distributed Object Management Facility plus basic object services. These will be discarded in ORB-Plus, but the Distributed Application Architecture, which dictates how objects are glued together, will be retained, as will existing Motif and Windows graphical user interfaces and development tools. Distributed Smalltalk was developed using ParcPlace Systems Inc’s VisualWorks application builder, which will mean that VisualWorks tools work with it. Hewlett-Packard is also selling and supporting other third party tools and is calling its entire object product portfolio ‘The Open Object Shop’. These products will include PowerSoft Corp’s PowerBuilder graphical user interface builder and Hitachi Ltd’s ObjectIQ application development environment. It also plans to offer Hitachi Ltd’s Object Reuser when that is released at ObjectWorld in San Francisco next month. Object Reuser is designed to browse between ObjectIQ objects and C++ objects using Hypertext via automatically generated indexes.
