The once vaunted object repository project initiated way back in May 1994 by Microsoft Corp and Texas Instruments Inc (CI No 2,407) is about to emerge as only a shadow of what was originally planned, according to our sister newsletter ClieNT Server News. The repository, once styled enterprise-class was originally intended to be the common file system for the merged version of Windows 95 and Windows NT code-named Cairo – a plan trashed a year ago – and should also have been the heart of the Composer applications development environment from Texas Instruments Software. With the repository’s first cut now scheduled to be next month, Microsoft has started trying to persuade tools vendors to buy into it. However, sources at a recent preview at the Microsoft campus in Redmond said that because the repository had now been scaled back to be little more than a desktop or workgroup affair, the tools vendors have been left unimpressed. Most have already played with an early beta test version, sent to 50 software vendors last October. Still, their reaction was apparently a rude awakening for Microsoft. The repository is admittedly late, a year or more depending on who’s making the estimate, and in the interim a slew of competitors have been pushing their own notions of NT-based repository technology onto the market. The bottom line for the TI-Microsoft repository looks to be too little, too late. At TI, meanwhile, the latest cut of Composer was released last week (CI No 3,086), without repository. Composer 4.0 has lots of new bells and whistles, but still uses TI’s tried-and-true Encyclopedia to store objects. The role of the repository, which will be added to Composer 4.0 some time in Q2, has been reduced to that of an add-on to hook Composer to other vendors’ programs, said TI Software marketing director Lawrence Wilkes. It seems the repository simply isn’t robust enough to handle the objects in the enterprise-class applications built with Composer. In the hope of softening the news, Wilkes insisted that there is still a possibility the repository will eventually grow up to be the enterprise-class software originally envisioned. But he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say whether TI even has a team actually working on such a project.
