Among manufacturers, Hewlett-Packard Co is just about the furthest down the object-oriented route, and doesn’t intend to surrender its lead. This week it introduced HP Distributed Smalltalk, claiming it to be the first complete implementation of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture specification for distributed computing. The technology, based on the Smalltalk language, is designed to enable programmers to develop object-oriented applications that can be used simultaneously by multiple computer users. It adds features and services on top of the Object Broker and Smalltalk to provide a rapid development environment for portable applications to be shared by workgroups, including a full set of object services and many sample applications, in the hope that this will enable developers to build new application objects quickly. These objects will be able to link to data stored anywhere in the enterprise using the company’s OpenODB object-oriented database. No prices were given. It cites the forecast of Hurwitz Consulting Group, Newton, Massachusetts that software products that in corporate object technology will account for over 60% of software sold in 1995.
