Hewlett-Packard Co has launched HP Orb Plus, describing it as a distributed computing system for building scalable object-oriented applications, and accompanied it with an enhanced version of HP Distributed Smalltalk. The company claims that Orb Plus is the only environment that combines the complete Common Object Request Broker Architecture 1.1 specification from the Object Management Group with the Distributed Computing Environment from the Open Software Foundation as its transport mechanism. It comprises the Distributed Object Management Facility, object services, developers’ and administrative tools, and sample applications. The object management facility provides a location-transparent object-communication mechanism across heterogeneous networks by using DCE, and is one of the fruits of Hewlett’s collaboration with SunSoft Inc on objects; the alliance means that users shoudl find it easier to move applications between Sun and Hewlett machines. Hewlett-Packard is also working with IBM Corp to integrate the Distributed Object Management Facility with IBM’s System Object Model with extensions for distribution. The new Version 2.0 of HP Distributed Smalltalk works with VisualWorks from ParcPlace Systems Inc to provide programmers with a rapid development environment for creating and running distributed applications that can use object databases – currently OpenODB from Hewlett and Gemstone from Servio Inc as their storage mechanism. Applications built with Distributed Smalltalk currently run without modification on Hewlett, Sun and IBM Unix systems and will also run on Macintosh and Windows 3.1 or Windows NT machines once VisualWorks 2.0 is out – within two months. HP Orb Plus is going out to a few key developers and the initial version will work with C++ on HP 9000s. For the mass market Developer’s Kit, C++, C and Smalltalk interoperability is planned so that objects written in different languages can be combined into one application – that should be ready in mid-1994 and will be priced then.
