Westborough, Massachusetts-based HyperDesk Corp, the Data General Corp spin-off and object management pioneer which has spent the better part of this year holding its own against the likes of Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co, is promising to be first out of the starting blocks with a product based on the Object Management Group’s hard-won, patched-together common Object Request Broker standard. HyperDesk was of course one of the companies whose technology, in concert with that of its partner Digital Equipment Corp, was merged with those of Sun, Hewlett, NCR Corp and Object Design Inc to create the Object Request Broker. This month, at Uniforum in San Francisco, the company is said to be planning to announce its Distributed Object Management System, a tools and services kit for building applications that can be distributed across disparate Unix clients and servers as well as MS-DOS systems. The Distributed Object Management System will doubtless be touted as a vehicle for achieving that heady but elusive feature that is expected to dominate 1992’s industry proceedings, interoperability. The Distributed Object System is expected to provide application developers with ready object access to application programming interfaces, remote procedure calls, network protocols and operating systems. In addition, it is intended to be used to define, build, modify and store objects. The Distributed System, which is believed to support both Windows and Motif, is distinct from the joint Hewlett-Sun contribution: it is dynamically constructed, meaning that applications can be created or modified at run-time and will not need to be re-compiled. It will also support relational and object-oriented databases. Tools include a definition language to create objects. Services will include an object database with repositories and class libraries for object storage, a Kerberos-based authentication service for user validation and a location service to track objects. The Distributed Object Management System is expected to be licensed on an OEM basis, to independent software vendors, value-added resellers, integrators and end-users when it becomes available in February, priced around $2,000 per user. A run-time version should follow in the summer, priced at around $5,000 per user. Although said to be wanting to hear only the sound of its own thunder at the show, the company will have alongside it Cambridge, UK-based IXI Ltd, which is expected to be one of the first HyperDesk users out of the hat. IXI plans to be demonstrating the object-oriented version of its X.desktop manager.
