If you feel isolated and out of touch with the object-oriented world because you reside in the UK and think everything happens in the US but you are seeking impartial and practical advice on the technology, then Object Designers Ltd, based in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire should be at the top of the list of companies to call. Steve Cook, who is the managing director of the company, has an impeccable career history with the technology. Between 1978 and 1990 he worked as a senior research fellow at London University’s Queen Mary College working on programming languages for interactive user interfaces. Basically, says Cook, in retrospect, he was trying to invent his own object-oriented language.
Discovered SmallTalk
Fortunately before he had spent much time attempting to reinvent this particuar software wheel, he discovered SmallTalk through reading books around his subject. At the time he was building concurrent extensions to Pascal but faced the problem of compilation overhead of the type system that SmallTalk doesn’t have. The next six years were spent doing various research projects around object-oriented languages. For the three years or so prior to leaving academe in 1990 Cook was working with IBM UK at Hursley, building a distributed multimedia workstation architecture using SmallTalk. The project was a success and while it was reaching completion Cook decided to leave university and enter the commercial world. His reasons were varied – he was inspired by Ralph Hodgson, the managing director of Interactive Development Environments UK Ltd, who encouraged him to start a business and is now non-executive director of Object Designers. He was also aware the university environment was not the most appropriate for being at the leading edge of technology because of its lack of both funding and commercial pressure. Cook had worked with Hodgson at the British Computer Society’s Object-Oriented Programming Systems group, a subgroup devoted to object-oriented programming that the two had established in 1985 to bring this technology to the British consciousness. The direction the business was to take came into being with the arrival of John Daniels as a director of Object Designers in April 1990. Daniels complements Cook well, since he came to object-oriented technology from a life as a commercial software designer. He was initiated in the mores of object-oriented design by working with Ada on military projects. He joined OOPS with the classic industrial approach to object-oriented technology, that is Ada, and found that everybody else had an academic background and was using SmallTalk. Indeed, mentioning Ada in the same breath as object-oriented was heresy in the rarified atmosphere of the OOPS group – a group which was instrumental in popularising the technology in the UK. However, Daniels persevered and setting up as an independent consultant he began a project to build an object-oriented real-time operating system – a system that he describes as a technical tour de force but a commercial disaster. It was before its time – he also learnt SmallTalk and looked at how object-oriented technology could be applied to the process industry controlling plant and machinery on the shop floor. As a consultant Daniels gave a number of training courses on object-oriented design and so this seemed the right avenue for the new company to explore.
By Katy Ring
Object Designers basically offers technology transfer: this covers anything from board-level presentations to software development commissions. For example, companies come to Object Designers wanting to know how they can adopt object-oriented technology, whereupon Object Designers will suggest a pilot project and ensure that it is successful. Indeed, Daniels and Cook are so confident of their skills that they believe any project they take on will be a success. They also depart from most players in the object-oriented consultancy game in arguing that the pilot project has to be of some importance – dallying in some corporate backwater will not get the technology anywhere. Othe
r success factors to be considered include the use of a small development team working on a medium-sized project for which it is not obvious how to apply traditional computing methods. As people who have been involved with object-oriented technology for a number of years, why start a venture such as Object Designers now? Cook and Daniels say that the technology is now at a stage where it is gaining momentum, where users are moving from the point of interest to the point of making a commitment. They think that the Object Management Group has done a brilliant job in making people see that there is more to object technology than programming languages and in this respect the Group has raised the profile and increased the credibility of the technology a great deal. Other factors currently driving the object-oriented bandwaggon are a misperception that object technology will save money, and the widespread use of graphical user interfaces. As Cook points out object technology will only save the user money in the long term as the benefits of software maintenance and re-use are reaped – it is not a bargain bucket technology to begin with. A more promising selling point for the technology is its use for developing graphical user interfaces as people are simply failing to build these using conventional technology. Cook says that frankly anybody attempting to develop graphical interface applications without object technology needs his brains tested. The big question is whether the technology offers the same advantages elsewhere.
Distributed workstations
Object Designers believes it does in the area of distributed workstations using client-server architectures because the complexity of the network necessitates a different type of software. Despite the fact that for both Cook and Daniels SmallTalk has had a formative influence in their pursuit of object-oriented technology, they say that they are perfectly happy to implement projects using C++ should the client require it. However, both believe that a lot of people are duped into thinking that because they already have C programmers, the step to C++ and object-oriented systems is that much simpler. It isn’t. This is because there is nothing in C++ to suggest how to use it and it doesn’t force you to take object-oriented concepts on board. Object Designers normally teaches SmallTalk to C++ clients just so they get used to the concepts in object technology. Furthermore, the two say that development time is considerably less using SmallTalk than C++, although it is more resource-consuming. If you want to know more about object technology give the company a call.
