In making its System Object Model announcements this week, IBM Corp revealed that it is getting closer to its Common Open Software Environment partners Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc on the object-oriented front. It announced agreements with SunSoft Inc and Hewlett to work together to enable software portability across the companies’ object-oriented software offerings using standards laid down by the Object Management Group. Separately, IBM and Hewlett-Packard agreed to integrate their respective object technologies into a common framework for distributed computing. Hoping to get the interfaces accepted as an Object Management Group standard, the IBM-Sunsoft-Hewlett triumvirate agreed to support them on their own distributed object development systems – IBM’s SOMobjects, Hewlett’s Distributed Object Management Facility and SunSoft’s Project Distributed Objects Everywhere. A set of common distributed object interfaces will enable software developers and information systems managers to create, manage and use applications across multiple open computing environments. The common framework for distributed computing agreed between IBM and Hewlett will provide the infrastructure needed to support the creation, management and use of object-oriented applications in a heterogeneous, distributed systems environment and will integrate IBM’s System Object Model and Hewlett’s Distributed Object Management Facility with extensions for distribution into an enabling framework for the implementation of IBM and Hewlett distributed object services, applications and development tools to provide a language-neutral, enterprise-wide heterogeneous support for building, managing and using distributed object-oriented applications that interoperate across multiple systems, initially HP-UX, AIX/6000 and OS/2 systems starting next year. And IBM announced plans to ship the SOMobjects Developer Toolkit 2.0, a professional programming toolkit incorporating IBM’s System Object Model and Distributed System Object Model technologies. It ships next quarter for OS/2 and AIX/6000.
