Is Taligent Inc going to succeed? It is a timely question, given that the first fruits of the alliance have just been announced. The answer, to save you reading all the way to the bottom, is a resounding ‘it’s too early to tell’ – however there are some promising signs. To get the most contentious issue out of the way: the company insists that it is still on target to produce a complete TalOS operating system in 1995. But before that there will be the TalDE development environment, this is due to go into pre-beta test later this year, with the full release due out in the first half of next year. It is a fair bet, then, that TalOS itself will not be ready until the second half of the year – not that that should surprise anyone. However this month, the first hand-picked 100 US developers got a pre-beta test release of the Taligent Application Environment, TalAE. This is the first fruit of the Apple Computer Inc-IBM Corp-Hewlett-Packard Co venture. The environment, currently running on top of IBM’s AIX Unix, consists of about 80 frameworks – collections of objects designed to fulfil particular roles. The full beta release, due out by the end of the year, should have the full complement of about 100 frameworks and the commercial release will follow shortly after, Taligent says. In the meantime, about 10 to 15 corporate developers and 13 high education sites and 75 independent software vendors into the tortuously named PEEK Partners Early Experience Kitprogramme.

Volte face

Meanwhile sister publication ClieNT Server News reports that Taligent has converted TalAE for Windows NT, and is running it in the labs – something of a volte face. Each PEEKer gets a two-day developer briefing, followed by six one-day training sessions. They then get to walk away with two Compact Disks containing the code and some sample applications. The disks also contain a set of development tools licensed from an Austrian development house – TakeFive Software GmbH, based in Salzberg, with a newly opened office in Cupertino, California. The company’s SNiFF+ tool has been used extensively in Taligent’s own development work and is an impressive-sounding object-oriented development environment for C and C++. It originates in work carried out by the Union Bank of Switzerland’s Ubilab research and development unit. Whether SNiFF+ will appear as a component part of the TalDE is a matter of conjecture which neither Taligent nor TakeFive want to talks about – so it probably won’t. These frameworks fit into three primary categories. At the highest end there are ‘application frameworks’. There are 17 of these, including compound document frameworks, user interface frameworks and the like. These sit atop 19 domain frameworks – specifying anything from international text, to two- and three-dimensional graphics support. Towards the bottom are either 45 ‘support frameworks’ which handle aspects of the application such as distributed computing, collaboration and a host of other low-level facilities. Together these frameworks represent more than 1,600 object class libraries, according to sources briefed earlier in the year. In the finished scheme they will be surrounded by the TalOS frameworks; at the moment they sit atop AIX. Taligent is not forthcoming about what is finished and what is not, but the PEEK programme is partly designed to elicit suggestions from developers about features they would like to see in the finished product. It seems that the distributed computing frameworks are still pretty fluid and that the collaborative distributed data access parts of TalAE are entirely absent from the pre-beta.

By Chris Rose

Similarly, the People, Places and Things user interface is incomplete. Like all good new operating systems, Taligent has its own, innovative graphical user interface. Some would argue that yet another graphical user interface is just what the industry doesn’t need. However analysts that have seen the stuff seem to be genuinely impressed. Of course, Taligent being the ground-breaking entity it is, it eschews such hum-drum terms as graphical

user interface, instead it favours the phrase User Experience Metaphor. Whether ‘UEM’ becomes an industry acronym of GUI’s onomatopaeiacally gooey stature is something else that only the future will reveal. Not surprisingly, ‘People’ objects store the details of users, co-workers, customers and so on. Each person can have multiple representations – a mugshot, say, or a business card. ‘Places’ are depicted by postcards and are used to represent anywhere in the work environment – such as the personnel department or the library. ‘Things’ are facsimile machines, modems, printers, documents, folders and so on. This metaphor may seem contrived, but Taligent believes it is the best way to cope with distributed data access. Instead of having to navigate servers, the user should be able simply to visit the appropriate virtual room. If you want an overtime form, simply visit the accounts department and grab the appropriate ‘Thing’. As always, the proof of the metaphor is in the clicking, and few users have tried it yet. In one way, the Taligent strategy is unusual. Instead of building an operating system then trying to tempt developers to use it, Taligent hopes to get the developers on board and then produce the operating system. It is similar to an approach Microsoft Corp has tried, introducing the Win32 applications programming interfaces in advance of its Chicago and Cairo next-generation versions of Windows and Windows NT. Unfortunately for Microsoft, its tactic seems to have confused a lot of developers. However, Brent Williams, an analyst with International Data Corp, believes that Taligent’s strategy could work. Because TalAE applications will run on top of existing operating systems – AIX, OS/2, HP-UX – developers can use it without what Williams describes as religious buy-in of technology. In other words they can retain their existing environment and use Taligent as they would any other tool. Then, once they have a nice base of Taligent applications, they will be tempted to try the operating system. It contrasts starkly with the usual model of building an operating system and then attempting to win hearts and minds of application developers.

Big splash

Williams’ belief is that Taligent will initially prove most attractive to in-house corporate developers, but will be taken up by developers of shrink-wrapped applications. There is one hole in the TalAE strategy, however, and it is a big one Microsoft Windows. The venture has announced nothing that indicates that the application environment will run on top of the world’s most populous (if not popular) desktop operating system. However ClieNT Server News says that there is an internal debate as to whether to implement TalAE on top of Chicago. Quite apart from any Chicago implementation, Taligent has one more joker in the pack – OpenDoc. Both Apple and IBM see OpenDoc as a stepping stone towards full Taligent-based applications and Wordperfect Corp is reportedly close to finishing its implementation of OpenDoc. So if – and here we are conjecturing wildly – if OpenDoc takes off and becomes a popular way of writing OLE 2-based Windows, these applications should be ripe for easy conversion to TalOS when it arrives. The same is true for Apple developers that opt for OpenDoc. And the Windows NT implementation of TalAE could cause problems for Microsoft’s Cairo object-oriented NT project, which has already slipped into 1995. TalOS’s other barrier to desktop acceptance will be memory and processor requirements, about which we know nothing. In short, if OpenDoc is embraced by the Apple and Windows programming community, if TalAE for Windows NT takes off, and if the finished operating system is fast and compact, Taligent could make a very big splash.

Chris Rose edits the Internet-only PowerPC News fortnightly.