The Object Management Group has issued a second Request For Technology for Object Services – specifications that are designed to standardise services, distribution, passing, linking and embedding of objects within distributed environments. It expects to release first details in November. The proposed specification is similar – but at a higher level of abstraction – to Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking and Embedding 2.0 specification, which is Microsoft’s object stepping-stone technology from Windows to Cairo via the Windows NT system. The Object Management Group has currently defined 30 application programming interfaces for specification. They cover a variety of object services including database concurrency control, externalisation, object relationships, time, transactions, security, query properties, event notification, start-up services and persistence. Each interface will be compliant with the Object Group’s Interface Definition Language, IDL, it says. The first four specifications, which the Object Management Group expects to ship by November, include a transaction interface to support atomic execution of operations. Security to support access control on objects. Data interchange, which defines the exchange of some or all of an object’s visible state between two objects, and concurrency control, which supports concurrent access of one or more objects by other objects. Other specifications will be released in eight months lifecycles after November, says Object Group president Chris Stone. A letter of intent to respond to the Request for Technology must reach the group by August 20. But most technology submissions are initially expected to come from Sun Microsystems Inc’s 20-strong consortium, JOSS, Joint Object Services Submission, which put forward object services proposals to the Object Management Group in February. Nonetheless, there will be room for other firms specialising in object persistence and Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding technology would also be welcome, according to the Group’s president Chris Stone.
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