IBM Corp-Apple Computer Inc joint venture Taligent Inc has set out its plans for applications development, following reports that portions of the technology will be used in future Apple Macs, and that Taligent will become Apple’s operating system of choice by next year. The company’s basic approach is to integrate re-usable sets of software and code into frameworks – objects, to the rest of us. The company’s Applications frameworks will contain over 100 of the Taligent frameworks, covering areas such as graphics, database access, multimedia, user interface, internationalisation, networking and distributed computing. Sitting on top of the Taligent frameworks is the graphical user interface in which all Taligent applications will run, called People, Places and Things. The company will ship three products in the next year. The Taligent Application Environment is a portable application development environment, which is expected to be released in the first quarter of next year. It comprises more than 100 base frameworks that developers will use to assemble programs, and will run under OS/2, AIX and Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP-UX – though not initially under Macintosh System. Taligent Object Services will be a true operating system that carries the concept of objects all the way down to the device driver level. Finally, the Taligent Development System will give developers tools to browse frameworks, and then visually assemble them into final products.
