Digital Equipment Corp and Microsoft Corp are expected to publish specifications for their Common Object Model in the next couple of weeks. Common Object Model will enable DEC ObjectBroker users to access and encapsulate objects in the Microsoft Object Linking & Embedding world and vice versa. It will comprise a set of application programming interfaces, and detail the underlying communications protocols that enable ObjectBroker and Object Linking & Embedding to make common calls – these are essentially DCE Remote Procedue Calls with added functionality. Meanwhile, DEC is planning to release version 2.5 of its ObjectBroker object request broker next month. This will provide an external gateway to Object Linking & Embedding and enable ObjectBroker applications to access data held in Object Linking applications. Version 3.0, which should be ready by the end of the year, will implement Common Object Model fully.
