Hewlett-Packard Co has found a new use for its Odaptor object-relational adaptor middleware. It has sprinkled some magic Java dust on it, added some graphical tools and repackaged the whole thing as Depot/J: a dynamic warehouse. Depot/J pulls data from disparate data sources, and adds some business logic to it to create business objects Java programmers can then include in their World Wide Web pages and other such applications. The data remains in its original store, rather than being copied to a central location and the business logic is stored and executed on the server, leading to smaller client applications, according to Hewlett. The meta data can be stored in either Oracle or Sybase databases. Odaptor was created in 1991 as a bridge between Small-talk and C++ applicat-ions. It was re-launched in 1994 as an overlay for Oracle 7 that enabled object-oriented applications and their data to be stored in an Oracle7 database. To do that, Hewlett-Packard stripped the object development and query component out of OpenODB, itself the combination of the AllBase/SQL relational data-base overlaid with a range of object technologies. Hewlett-Packard Depot/J will be up under SunSoft Inc’s Solaris and HP-UX in late summer, with a Windows NT version following before the year-end. It supports all the major databases as well as Symantec Corp’s Cafe and Rogue Wave Software Inc’s JFactory Java development tools. The price will not be fixed until the current beta testing program is over, according to Cyndi Nickel, the Depot/J product manager.
