A source tells us our sister paper Unigram.X that one of the reasons that the SunSoft Inc arm of Sun Microsystems Inc has been so discreet about Spring and Project Distributed Objects Everywhere object-oriented developments is that it doesn’t want Microsoft Corp to know too much. Be that as it may, our source notes that Spring has been written from scratch, is not Unix and owes nothing to any code owned by Unix System Laboratories Inc, so Sun will not have to pay any royalties on it. It is said to be good at garbage collection, has built-in exception handling, and strong type checking. It supposedly has a real remote procedure call system, much better than Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call, and can communicate within a machine or between machines. We’re also told to say that it has strong separation of the interface from the implementation. Sun’s first problem will probably be getting Sun people themselves to use the environment, the transition from C or even C++ to objects not being without its hazards, as object people well know.
