This week, two year-old object-oriented software developer Objective Software Technology Ltd, Livingston, Scotland, will introduce OST-Look, an animation tool designed to enable users to reconstruct an animated object-level view of a C++ program as it’s executed. The firm, set up by two ex-British Telecommunications Plc C++ software engineers using funds from the government-run Scottish Enterprise scheme, has already signed up Admiral Software Ltd, Camberley, Surrey, to distribute OST-Look in the UK and is currently in OEM negotiations with Sun Microsystems Inc satellite Sun-Pro Inc. OST-Look is a graphical C++ monitoring system that runs under Microsoft Windows, NT and OSF/Motif. According to Objective Software Technology, the software extracts objects and class design-levels embodied in C++ programs and uses them to generate active object, class and message diagrams. Traditionally, most developers have just used debuggers, setting breakpoints when specified lines or functions are executed, to generate code information, says Eddie Anderson, Objective’s managing director. But OST-Look adopts a different approach. It uses the structure of object-oriented programs to select specified parts of code and represents the application graphically on screen. Multiple windows can be created to run up to five different views of a program simultaneously. Other OST-Look features include: graphical replay, which lets users replay sequences of an application after it has been run; source viewing, which provides source-level debugging and editing capabilities; and data viewing, which enables multiple data browsing and editing windows to be created from an object layout. The software is available now for Sun and Windows systems – Windows NT versions will follow later in the year. Objective is now developing an object-oriented testing tool for third party software engineering dev-elopment environments, due third quarter next year.
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