Apple Computer Inc, which is preparing its OpenDoc for release at the end of the year, says the system-independent software architecture is a key technology in the company’s goal of reinventing personal computing. In town to talk about OpenDoc, and planned enhancements to System 7.5, David Nagel, senior vice-president, worldwide research & development said OpenDoc will enable us to redefine and invent new ways of developing software and gives us the technical tools to change user experience of computing and make it more accessible to people. As a company, Apple views the development and industry-wide support of OpenDoc as as important as the industry’s move from complex instruction set chips to RISC. Nagel described OpenDoc as more than just a system for sharing documents within a group: it consists of five function layers that enable the development of re-usable bits of code that work with other applications, called part editors, available from different vendors. Those layers are Compound Document Services that handle the human interface and enable part editors to work together; Component Services, which enable part editors from different development teams to work together and which contain code libraries for negotiating resources, registering and storing objects for co-operative use; Automation Services that provide the programmatic interface for the scripting OpenDoc parts; Object Management Services based on IBM Corp’s System Object Model object request broker; and Interoperability Services, designed to make it easier to create interoperable part editors. Apple says OpenDoc’s code is 80% common across Mac OS, OS/2 and Windows and with the support of an increasing number of firms, but not Microsoft Corp, it believes it can bring about a revolution to comp onent-based software; an early release is with 50,000 developers. Nagel also points out that while OpenDoc is often mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft’s Object Linking & Embedding technology, the two are very different. He described the Spanish expletive as no more than a means to link applications; OpenDoc made networking more seamless than it is today, and was designed to create component software. Additionally, OpenDoc is being made non-proprietary where Microsoft relies on its market dominance to win de facto standard status for its offerings. But OpenDoc is interoperable with Object Linking & Embedding and has been recognised by Microsoft, even if it won’t support it. One of the first OpenDoc products to ship will be the CyberDog Internet browser: the Internet is an area of key interest to Apple, which plans to build part editors for the Internet that simplify navigation, can be embedded to enable Internet access from any document, and that users and developers can integrate using OpenDoc. But while Apple had been expected to integrate OpenDoc with Taligent Inc’s CommonPoint objects framework, released in a reference form this month to owners Apple, IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co (CI No 2,679), Apple says this is not definite.
Aborted Pink
It will deliver Taligent’s environment for Mac OS but has not decided whether to bundle it or sell it separately; it is not likely to offer it in the consumer market. CommonPoint is an operating system-independent environment aimed at experienced C++ developers building distributed multi-system object-oriented applications. It’s derived from Apple work on its aborted Pink object-oriented operating system, and when Taligent began work, it planned to develop a full operating system, but it soon realised there was no room for yet another desktop environment and decided a system-independent development environment would be a better commercial bet.
