With Netscape Communications Corp now committed to providing support for Corba objects from its client and server web products, IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc are trying to get some momentum behind their own distributed object and middleware technologies by cross-licensing key enabling components and developing new interoperability mechanisms. IBM is licensing Joe, Sun’s Java object request broker, which connects Java applets directly with server-based Corba applications and will port to its System Object Model (SOM), version 3.0 of which is due by year-end. Meantime Sun is licensing class libraries which includes interfaces to IBM’s MQSeries messaging system that manages communications between applications running across distributed networks. The class libraries could be used to provide a way to pass messages asynchronously between Java and Corba object request brokers. As well as announcing its long anticipated port of the CICS transaction processing server to Solaris, which is due in the fourth quarter, IBM will also provide class libraries that’ll allow Java programmers to access CICS applications. In addition, the companies will bring their respective Neo and SOM object models closer by developing a common naming service based upon Corba specifications for use with their object request brokers. Observers say it could allow SOM applications running on any IBM platform to work transparently with Neo objects running on Solaris. Meantime Sun is to integrate Unicode international character set class libraries which IBM’s Taligent unit has converted from C++ to Java. Applets which use their interfaces will be able to automatically supply dates, currencies, numbers and text into local formats. IBM will today announce the first 50 developers working with its San Francisco (Shareable Frameworks) technologies for creating applications out of reusable components. San Francisco will provide low-level programming architectures and high-level services that will allow multiple information feeds to be incorporated into application design.
