Novell Inc is leaping aboard the object-oriented bandwaggon, saying it will be getting itself an object repository and an object framework as part of a company-wide object strategy that it promises to describe in the near future. Novell recently described some of the ways it will bring the OpenDoc compound object technology to NetWare, and then UnixWare environments, although vice-president strategic planning for NetWare and object technology Joe Firmage told our sister paper Unigram.X it was wrong to characterise those plans as simply componentising its product lines. The company’s long-term ambition is to offer object-oriented application partitioning with all business logic residing on servers running SuperNOS, its planned microkernel merging of NetWare and UnixWare, with Windows, Macintosh and OS/2 supported as front ends. The road to this object destination begins with the provision of an object infrastructure for NetWare and UnixWare; OpenDoc, including its support for Microsoft Corp Object Linking & Embedding, overlaying IBM Corp’s System Object Model Object Request Broker; client and server services; and a common set of tools. These are not parallel developments, and NetWare will get fixed up first. However much of the work is planned to be available for use by Novell’s planned common SuperNOS code-base, which is due late next year. The first step on the journey includes Compound Document Services for NetWare supporting OpenDoc, Object Linking & Embedding and integration with NetWare Directory Services. A pre-beta release of OpenDoc for Windows with all OpenDoc 32-bit features is out now, and a software development kit of the 1.0 release is due in the autumn. Novell’s applications group will add OpenDoc to its packages through 1996 and 1997. Novell says that it does have early SuperNOS code up and running, using Chorus Systemes SA’s microkernel, but it is just not showing it to anyone, be they partners or customers, just yet. Novell is also saying that it has signed an agreement with the French mic rokernel concern covering the further extension of Chorus’s kernel for use in SuperNOS.
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