Although the Taligent Inc joint Apple Computer Inc-IBM Corp-Hewlett-Packard Co object-oriented venture released its CommonPoint application frameworks to a wide set of beta testers last month (CI No 2,635), it has pushed back the availability of its full TalOS until sometime next year. CommonPoint was released to a small number of US commercial and academic developers last year, since when the number of application frameworks has been fleshed out, and improved. But although CommonPoint is now said to be functionally complete, there is still performance and tuning work required before the completed 1.0 reference implementation is made available later this year. This tuning could well prove critical to the application development tool’s commercial success. People who saw the Peek incarnation of the product tended to be impressed by its power and flexibility, but horrified by the speed of the stuff when running on an IBM RS/6000 on top of AIX.
Tunes its baby
Taligent’s owners will take the reference implementation and then adapt it for their own operating system environments, so the overall performance of Commonpoint applications will depend not only on how well Taligent tunes its baby but also on how well the individual adaptations are carried out. IBM is intending to put CommonPoint atop OS/2, Hewlett-Packard will stick it on top of HP-UX and Apple is still promising it for a future unspecified version of Mac OS. At the same time, Taligent has its own implementations up its sleeve – a Windows NT version has been demonstrated repeatedly, but won’t be ready until next year. A Windows95 version is expected to be derived from the NT code, but Taligent still claims that it has not managed to get hold of a copy of the Windows95 beta release to begin development. There are still two other parts of the Taligent jigsaw that have yet to be fitted together, one, the TalDE, Taligent development environment, is still being promised for later this year, but the full-blown TalOS, Taligent operating system, has now slipped into that vaporous territory known as next year – in effect, no-one wants another operating system.
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