The bi-directional object translation technology that Quebec, Canada-based Visual Edge Technology Ltd has been working on for the last couple of years, is being championed by a bunch of vendors as a solution to the problem of incompatible object systems. The company’s technique is going down so well that as well as licensing what it calls ObjectBridge to IBM Corp, Oracle Corp, Apple Computer Inc, Taligent Inc and Iona Technologies Ltd, the company’s object map – of which ObjectBridge is a coded implementation – has been submitted to Part A of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Model-to-Common Object Request Broker Architecture Request for Proposals by Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM, Iona, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, SunSoft Inc and Visual Edge itself. The ObjectBridge – first outlined here last September (CI No 2,501) – intercepts requests and messages from one object system, say Object Linking & Embedding, deciphers it, and uses a calling convention description supplied by an Object System Adaptor for the target system – such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture – to create pointers that it will interpret as native calls. In through one slice of the object cake and out through any other is one description we heard of the mechanism. The company, however, describes its map as a more sophisticated version of basic interoperability models provided by the likes of Iona, which can wrap a Common Object Request Broker Architecture object to look like an Object Linking & Embedding object, but can’t then go back the other way, or deal with errors and exception handling. It is not a panacea, Visual Edge president Mike Foody stresses, but it works well for cross-system interoperability between different event and transaction models, including Common Object Request Broker Architecture and Object Linking & Embedding Automation, environments for which it has already created Object System Adaptors that go with the ObjectBridge. The technology will work just as well for Common Object Model, OpenDoc’s Open Scripting Architecture, System Object Model, Orbix and others, Foody says; adaptors for System Object Model and Orbix have already been created. Some licensees will use ObjectBridge as the basis of next-generation object environments, and others will create adaptors for existing products.
Clearing house
Oracle is expected to use ObjectBridge in a 1996 iteration of its Developer 2000 tool, which is used for creating objects that can be used across distributed systems on multiple object-oriented systems. Setting itself up as a kind of object clearing house, Visual Edge’s business model calls for partners to licence adaptors they create back to it; it will supply them to other ObjectBridge licensees. Once an adaptor for a system is linked in, the object system automatically gains interoperablity with all other supported object systems for which an adaptor has been installed, Foody says. Further revisions of the system will add multi-level client-server support. Visual Edge’s UIM/X development system already dominates the world of X Window-based graphical user interface builders. It expects to do $60m this year, $10m better than last year, on the tools which it first shipped in 1989. Foody says that many ideas for ObjectBridge, which has cost it several million dollars to develop, came from insights gleaned into vendors’ strategies as it was selling them on its UIM/X.
