Sun Microsystems Inc is chugging away along the NeXTstep trajectory that will provide a leg up into its full-blown Distributed Objects Everywhere/OpenStep environment, and last week announced that it will begin distributing native versions of the object-oriented NeXT Computer Inc operating environment on its Sparcstation 4, 5 and 20 workstations. End-user and developer copies of NeXTstep 3.3 – both the interface and Mach microkernel – will ship in the US in June, worldwide in July, prices start at $800 and $5,000 respectively. NeXTstep provides some of the application development frameworks that feature in Sun’s Distributed Objects Everywhere. OpenStep is the operating system-independent version of the NeXTstep user environment, an implementation of which will be included in Distributed Objects Everywhere.
Object competency
As well as offering tools and services for moving applications created under NeXTstep across to Distributed Objects Everywhere, Sun Microsystems Computer Corp, Sun’s hardware arm now run by Ed Zander, says that it will continue to offer native NeXTstep releases for Sparc as they emerge. The 3.3 implementation was a joint development effort, it says. As well as offering the Common Object Request Broker Architecture network layers, frameworks and tools supplied by SunSoft Inc and third parties, the 20-strong software development group inside Sun Microsystems Computer plans to create a series of object competency centres that will turn Sun hardware-based object-oriented offerings into products for specific vertical markets such as finance, telecommunications and manufacturing. Distributed Objects Everywhere was originally due out of Bud Tribble’s SunSoft object team sometime in the second half; Sun Microsystems Computer now reckons that it will have commercial Distributed Objects Everywhere-based offerings out in the market by the end of the year, but that does seem rather unlikely given Tribble’s latest time-scales.
