One of the things this MacWorld has done is convince customers and analysts that OpenDoc, one of the bridgeware technologies Apple has been talking about is finally beginning to take shape in the real world. An object-oriented distributed component software architecture, OpenDoc gives you the ability to use software components from different vendors and make them work together. The technology has been talked about in theory for years, but it’s still not clear how much effort Apple is willing to put into promoting it actively, especially in light of IBM’s somewhat lukewarm attitude towards fulfilling its responsibility for implementing the Windows version. At any rate, the OpenDoc pavilion, under the banner of the nascent industry’s trade association, C100 or The Component 100, had more than a dozen mainly small start-ups demonstrating various Live Objects, OpenDoc parts which can be integrated with each other. And across the hall in Apple’s Developer Central arena, Corel Corp was showing an early version of WordPerfect as an OpenDoc container. Its later release could have a very positive effect in kick starting the technology. Some of the impressive Live Objects products shown in the OpenDoc pavilion were WAV, from Digital Harbor Inc, a new kind of word processor which is both an OpenDoc container and component; Dock’Em, a page-layout component from MetaMind Corp; Text Machine, from PreFab Software Inc, which is actually a text service for integration into other components, brings the power of pattern matching to the desktop by adding a sophisticated search and replace dialogue to other compatible components; Quebec, Canada-based Adrenaline Software Inc’s Adrenaline Numbers & Charts, a next-generation spreadsheet and graphing application; Canopy Outliner, from Eclipse Services, a division of Quadrivium Inc, for organising any kind of information interactively in outline form; SoftLinc Inc’s LEXI, a multilingual spell checker; and LiveAccess, a database front- ending toolkit and framework for existing databases. The Component 100 Web site can be found at http://www2.c100.org/c100/
MACWORLD – APPLE OPENDOC, FINALLY READY FOR THE REAL WORLD?
