Firmly rejecting the belief that the brave new world of object-oriented programming should finally see off Cobol, Micro Focus Plc has announced support for IBM Corp’s System Object Model technology, which is the element in OS/2 2.0 that provides a way for objects and object definitions to be packaged regardless of the programming language in which they were developed. The goal of the collaboration is to give Cobol programs access to objects generated by other programming languages. The System Object Model enables an object to be created from a language-neutral class definition and then be used by and subclassed by any one of several other languages. The methodology eliminates the need for recompiling applications to accomodate object implementation modifications and enables class libraries to be written once and then re-used by several different object-oriented languages. Micro Focus says it is assessing how its Object-Oriented Option for Micro Focus Cobol Workbench can support the enabling technology. IBM plans to support the System Object Model in AIX, and it is expected to turn up in Taligent Inc’s Pink.
