Hewlett-Packard Co argues that it needs the three object environments it has picked up, Taligent, NeXTstep and Object Linking & Embedding, to be able to communicate to different customers with different information technology strategies and, maybe, different solutions within different departments. It is, therefore, working towards the eventual integration of a single object-based messaging system that will be able to function across the different environments. As well as Corba and Interface Definition Language, Hewlett-Packard says that the industry requires an additional software transport stack for integrating other types of local area networks and network topologies. This is because there is more to interoperability than on-the-wire addressing and messaging, it says. Transactions should take place between models, it believes, so that ‘faceless’ objects can interact, enabling, for example, users to drop Excel spreadsheets into a FrameMaker document. The Object Management Group and the industry is not focused on solving these desktop-to-desktop integration issues, the company asserts. It sees the possibility of a new breed of business objects to deliver this kind of functionality, which would have the effect of forcing the necessary middleware into industrial-quality shape for commercial organisations. Aspects such as different display technologies also need addressing. In its view, object interfaces should plug into the backbone service just as any telephone, from any manufacturer, can plug into the telephone socket.
