NEC Corp’s US Systems Laboratory in New Jersey has created a piece of object-oriented middleware called ORBital, described as a framework that will support a wide variety of functions, including the execution of mainframe batch jobs and provision of a single system view to clustered environments. NEC has licensed parts of ORBital to new buddy Hewlett-Packard Co as part of a joint development project to create a Corba-based distributed object environment the two say will offer a range of services to independent software vendors for creating object-based systems and network management applications. NEC and Hewlett-Packard have previously collaborated on the specification of topology and event notification services for use in Object Group Corba environments and have submitted them to X/Open Co Ltd for use as common object services. Although a prototype version of ORBital was built upon a NEC object request broker the company says it is implementing a production version for third party request brokers and is developing a high-level application programming interface that it says will enable developers to create large-scale distributed object systems spanning multiple object request brokers if required. ORBital can use NEC’s existing Percio database for persistent storage where that is required (CI No 2,476), although the company says that most users will choose to deploy ORBital against their existing relational databases. NEC’s NetShepard batch job management, NetAdmin and TP-Base transaction processing applications are currently being re-worked using object-oriented techniques.
