Lotus Development Corp is in serious discussions to acquire EdgeResearch Inc, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire developer of a high-level object-oriented Notes application programming interface called hiTest, PC Week hears. The Edge deal has not actually been finalised but is virtually done, Lotus sources told the paper as each company declined to comment on the potential deal. The acquisition would give Lotus access to what is seen as a more robust implementation of the Notes programming interface, and enable it to sell Edge’s Visual Basic controls for Notes alongside its other development tools. Lotus has promised developers an improved, object-oriented Notes programming interface by the time Notes 4.0 is released next year, but it could now come sooner with the Edge acquisition. As well as being object-oriented, hiTest collapses many Notes calls into a single function call, cutting the amount of C code developers have to write.
