Object-oriented programming appears to be taking off in Scandinavia, with a number of companies, including CEC of Kista and Abalon, Bromma, showing products. CEC distributes C++ products from Oregon and Glockenspiel, but Abalon was showing a prototype of its own Xancus II software development environment on the Informix stand. Xancus II is a development tool that works over the relational database and provides an interface into the data – it has already been used to develop a number of software packages now out on the Swedish market. The Abalon product could be the answer for those database companies such as Informix wanting to move to object-oriented database technology – Informix has introduced Binary Large Objects, or BLOBS into its database technology, but not gone any further. The Abalon system is a set of object-oriented class libraries that can be used to describe the database and presentation aspects of a software application, and can be used as they stand or modified to suit. According to Abalon, development that takes a day and a half using a traditional fourth generation language can be done in an hour. SunView, Motif, X.11 and MS-Windows versions are being developed.
