Hewlett-Packard Co is racing down the object-oriented programming road and on Monday it inaugurated a distributed object computing programme that it says will accelerate its efforts to develop and deliver a distributed object computing environment for heterogeneous networked systems. The company is building on the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture standard, and says its new environment provides the benefits of distributed object technology without requiring users to adopt a new operating system. The company is seeking to map out a route whereby users can migrate to distributed object computing without having to jettison their existing applications and data. The planned environment will integrate all the company’s framework products, which currently include its NewWave, Visual User Environment, OpenView, OpenODB database and C++ and the SoftBench development environment. The company notes that it started marketing object technology in 1986 when it shipped the object-based Virtual Instrument System for Test and Analysis and followed it up in 1987 with the NewWave object-oriented desktop manager for Microsoft Corp’s Windows. The company put up the Distributed Object Management Facility to the Object Management Group as a joint submission with Sun Microsystems Inc, and it is now part of the Request Broker Architecture: it now plans to take products based on the Object Management standard and add value to them. The first software releases based on the distributed object environment are planned to be ready in the first half of 1993.
