SunSoft Inc’s Joint Object Services Submission has now been passed to the Object Management Group’s board of directors for final approval and should be ratified as a standard in the next week or so. Joint Object Services’ name will then be changed to the Common Object Services Standard, Common Object Services. This covers such issues as how to create and destroy objects, how to name them and how they should relate to one another. And SunSoft claims it is the only vendor to have implemented both Common Object Services and the Object Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture in its product, namely Distributed Objects Everywhere. As well as developing its own applications, it also attests to having about 50 customers building others from the developers releases of Distributed Objects Everywhere it started shipping in July. These customers range from commercial and scientific organisations to universities in the US, Europe and Japan – Sun is keen to have a broad user base to encourage take-up of the product. It says that it is also discussing OEM agreements with 12 other unnamed vendors, and is investing heavily in Distributed Objects Everywhere in terms of cash and staff resources – if you know any engineers, we’re hiring, it declared. One particular area of focus is the development of application development tools and enabling technology in general. Furthermore, Sun expects to pass the specification documents for mapping Object Group’s Interface Definition Language to C++ that it jointly developed with Iona Technology Ltd, NEC Corp and Hyperdesk Corp to the Object Group this month. It is also working on a standard for persistent object storage, and is considering releasing its Spring distributed object-oriented operating system as a product – at the moment, Spring is simply a research project out of which many Distributed Objects Everywhere products have come.
