Four-year-old San Diego-based Expersoft Corp, an up-and-comer in the object arena, has redesigned its C++-based XShell object management environment, consisting of its XShell object request broker and a suite of integrated tools and services that’s used for application develop ment, with a new distributed daemon architecture, reports our sister publication ClieNT Server News. The latest version, 3.0 – which currently supports Microsoft Corp’s Windows and Windows NT as clients – features new services and tools for name-space management, administration, sec urity and transaction management. ExperSoft believes that XShell blurs the distinction between Unix and NT. By April, ExperSoft expects to support NT fully as a peer-to-peer operating system both as far as messaging goes as well as control, something it may have over competitor Iona Technologies Ltd of Dublin, now a team-mate of Sun Microsystems Inc. ExperSoft could bring a level of functionality to Object Linking & Embedding such as inheritance, a key ingredient in object-oriented programming. Although XShell’s initial development pre-dates the Object Management Group’s first specification of its Common Object Request Broker Architecture, this new version supports CORBA’s static client interface and the company will add full support of CORBA’s dynamic client interface and server-sider interface over this next year. Creates the illusion
ExperSoft claims the XShell DOME contains the industry’s only distributed object request broker with transparent object distribution, asynchronous messaging, encapsulation of legacy code, integrated services and system independence. ExperSoft further claims that it delivers the interoperability that’s been missing to date from this kind of stuff. It is expected to submit its technology to the Object Group to answer its CORBA 2 interoperability Request for Proposals. So did 12 other companies. The Object Group is already famous for the alliances its standards efforts create and the company most closely attuned to ExperSoft is AT&T Global Information Solutions with its Cooperative Frameworks. ExperSoft creates the illusion of locality by making objects appear as if they are included in a local program when they actually exist transparently on remote machines as surrogates. This way XShell can define objects that are both clients and servers and facilitate peer-to-peer computing. The other key element in XShell’s core technology is asynchronous messaging which improves speed and data transfer rates. It also enables the entire network to be treated as a parallel supercomputer for large computational problems. After considerable study, XShell has been selected by Andersen Consulting Eagle Technology Team, an advanced development group, as the basis for a new distributed object architecture supporting custom vertical applications. Eagle reportedly compared it to CORBA products and found it superior in speed and functionality, particularly in its transparency in migrating objects, its optimisation in managing large objects and its ability to support additional concurrent users by distributing object request broker functions around the environment. XShell currently supports Sparc, Hewlett-Packard, RS/6000, Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix and Silicon Graphics Inc machines. Its Distributed Object Request Broker and bundled services including Object Naming Service, Class Processor and Administration Tools cost $9,600; its XShell Security, XShell IDL Compiler (available in the third quarter) and XShell TP Manager at $3,000 each and its XShell Rules and XShell Fuzzy at $4,800 each. All are priced per developer terminal. Run-time licences are $500 per product per user.
