Sedona might have crashed and burned on the highway of extended data types – it’s not canceled, but it will not come to market as originally envisaged, Oracle Corp says – but hey, hats off to its tools people, who took just a day to dream up a new product they say will fulfill part of Sedona’s original goal. There’s supposedly another set of object tools lying around that will be accelerated to market much more quickly than had been planned. Developed by a different team than the Sedona group the tools – said to substitute for some unidentified piece of Sedona – will only beta next quarter, suggesting the Sedona object tools themselves have been put back some considerable time. Sounds like Oracle’s still trying to figure out how to do the new work because it won’t say what the tools would be used for or what pieces of Sedona they step in for. The company promises to make an announcement about its object strategy, but no date has been set and it will definitely not be in time for the official Oracle8 launch on the 24th June. Sedona, which first surfaced as a code name for the firm’s next generation object-oriented toolset more than two years ago, just can’t live up to the new demands of a network-centric environment and all that implies – the internet and Java. While a new specification needs to be drawn up, but it is almost certain that some Sedona technologies will survive – the strongest probability being the repository.
