The Object Management Group will issue a Request for Technology for Common Facilities – distributed compound documents – in December or January. The facilities will act as a common object interface on top of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture. Likely contenders include Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking and Embedding, OpenDoc and Lotus Development Corp’s LEL Link Embedded and Launch-to-edit. The Group is also working on the second version of Object Services, which will include an object interface for transaction processing. It said it received 22 responses to this Request for Technology and expects the specification to be ready by April or May next year. Lastly, the Group reckons the CORBA 2 specification for interoperability will be complete by August or September next year. Products should start appearing about three months later, it says. And it added, it has already chosen a suitable object broker for CORBA 2. But because it needs to finalise legal details, an announcement will not be forthcoming for the next couple of months.
