As part of their joint efforts to evolve object-oriented technology, Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co are working with a bevy of object database companies so that software developers will be able to write programs that will work with any object database. The database companies concerned are Burlington, Massachusetts-based Ontos Inc, Versant Object Technology Inc, Object Design Inc and Objectivity Inc, and the work will result in the development of a common applications programming interface known as an Object Database Adaptor. The group, formed because of a lack of interest from the standards bodies, has met four times so far, and plans to offer its completed work to the Object Management Group. The Object Database Adaptor sits between the database and the Object Request Broker, and when it receives a request for and object, invokes the corresponding database. Sun is not working on its own database, according to Sun’s distinguished engineer Rich Cattell, but believes in using the best tool for the job, ranging presumably from Hewlett-Packard’s hybrid relational and object approach with OpenODB and Object SQL to the purer object databases of its other development partners. Sun, however, is preparing Persistence, a so-called poor man’s object database, with 10% of the usually-found facilities, as a bundled-in default mechanism for storing objects that come packaged with the Object Request Broker: it was part of the original joint Hewlett-Packard-Sun proposal to the Object Management Group.
