As reported, (CI No 1,891, 1,900) Hewlett-Packard UK Ltd and Hitachi Ltd have signed a deal enabling Hewlett to distribute Hitachi’s object-oriented development tool ObjectIQ in Europe. Mr Ogawa, deputy general manager of the Hitachi Software Development Centre in Japan, explained that his company has long had an ambition to become a world software player. With ObjectIQ the company begins to realise that ambition. Possibly significant is the fact that this appears to be a European deal only at the moment – the product’s closest rivals come from small West Coast US companies such as IntelliCorp and among the computing fraternity in Silicon Valley, where virulent Yellow Perilism is rife, a dim view would presumably be taken of the deal offering a potential public relations headache for Hewlett. So what is ObjectIQ? Written in C it is an object-oriented and rule-based development environment complete with editors, browsers and debuggers. It has built-in database access to Informix, Ingres, Oracle and Sybase and a General Data Interface to enable bridges to be built to other databases or file formats. The toolset also includes a Motif graphical user interface builder that has graphical layout editors and that links into the object model and rule base. ObjectIQ applications can be embedded in C programs, C library calls can be made from ObjectIQ and objects can encapsulate methods written in C. The core development work for the product was carried out by Hitachi in Japan where the product has been sold for the past five years under the name ES/Kernel. It currently has more than 4,000 users and Hewlett-Packard Europe Software Development Group in Bristol has had a specification input to product development since 1990. Both Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard are committed members of the Open Software Foundation alternative Unix club and the Object Management Group and future versions of the product will track standards from these bodies as they emerge. Future enhancement areas for ObjectIQ include integration with software engineering, object-oriented database and multimedia technologies. The tool is aimed at professional software developers be they independent software vendors, systems integrators, or internal staff at large companies. The development licence costs UKP9,850 with runtime licences priced at UKP1,950. Available in the UK from Hewlett-Packard, ObjectIQ runs on the HP 9000 range. Support and consultancy is being provided by the company’s Bristol base.
