What is Distributed Objects Everywhere? It is a question we have had to ask so many times we have lost count. SunSoft Inc’s vice-president for objects and object-orientation guru, Bud Tribble, says Distributed Objects Everywhere will enable businesses to develop and deploy software that they will be able to change, enhance or rework time and time again to suit changing business process requirements. SunSoft reckons it currently takes months or years to change software to meet new business needs when success – time to market – depends upon the ability to implement new software to deliver products vis a vis the competition. The vision comes across as radically different to Taligent Inc’s plan for providing to a single volume application programming interface for independent software vendors to develop to a la Microsoft Corp. In SunSoft’s Distributed Objects Everywhere world, the development environment is key. Anything else is putting the cart before the horse, argues Tribble, looking at TalDE lagging CommonPoint by months. The picture SunSoft drew us has the OpenStep application environment, a development environment (Workshop C++), an object network, cross-system integration, network object administration and a new database and legacy code integration module.
Chatting
SunSoft said it would deliver beta versions of most of the technology early this year and ship product after mid-1995 – it would not be more specific. Only the database integration module will be completely missing from the first raft of software. It is an addition to Solaris, not a rebuild, Tribble said, claiming Distributed Objects Everywhere’s beta programme will be smoother than Taligent’s, given that at least some of the components, such as those from NeXT Computer Inc’s NeXTstep have been in use for some time. The Distributed Objects Everywhere business model does not call for licensing it on non-Solaris systems, though SunSoft said it would do so where it is wanted. So far it counts Siemens Nixdorf Informationssyteme AG as its only public licensee, but claims to be talking to others. Way back when Taligent Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc failed to come to terms, we asked Sun how come and the only answer we got was that it could not come to business terms, with no further details. Well, we ran into Taligent chief Joe Guglielmi just the other day and while we were chatting, asked him what had happened. He reckoned Sun chief executive Scott McNealy was the gating factor in the deal and said Sun – that is Scott – wanted a deal where all the royalties were paid up-front – like the deal it cut with Novell Inc for Unix. Guglielmi’s problem with that demand was that Sun could then go off and develop the Taligent technology any way it wanted and would not be committed, over the long haul, to the Tal-igent application programming interfaces represented in CommonPoint, the framework application environment Taligent formerly called TalAE. Guglielmi understood that the one issue that will make or break companies for the foreseeable future is application programming interfaces, and object interfaces at that. The one other person who understood this was Bill Gates with his Win32 interface. Guglielmi just needs a snappy name for his interfaces like Gates has. There were business, technical and financial reasons why Sun did not come to terms with Taligent, according to SunSoft Tribble. Taligent’s business model, in its mind, is a regressive 1980s model a la Apple Computer Inc, which sought to create a single volume application programming interface around the Macintosh operating system for attracting independent software vendors.
By William Fellows
SunSoft, he said, was concerned to adopt a more business process-oriented architecture. Technically, Taligent’s design was again too concerned with creating an object-oriented Macintosh and hacking-on networking and distributed functionality. Moreover, its hundreds of frameworks and thousands of class libraries make it far too complicated, especially for development training. Taligent c
ould not meet Sun’s financial requirements for up-front royalty payment, Tribble said, but claimed these were very much secondary considerations to the business and technical issues. Distributed Objects Everywhere is not simply a C++ compiler bolted to Solaris’ procedural application programming interfaces and tools. At the low level, SunSoft is adding the Common Object Request Broker Architecture infrastructure, Object Management Group application programming interfaces for sharing all kinds of objects across distributed environments, from the ability to pass simple word processing documents to replicated data and secure information. The application environment is where the OpenStep application programming interfaces derived from NeXT Computer Inc’s NeXTstep reside, just as Taligent Inc’s application programming interfaces reside in CommonPoint. The Distributed Objects Everywhere application environment includes a set of commonly-used mechanisms for building applications that are stored as re-usable class libraries, objects, which have been converted from NeXTstep. They describe how things like printing will work within any application under Distributed Objects Everywhere. The Object Group’s Common Object Services Specifications are included here so that objects for transaction, mapping and other services can be used. The main difference between Distributed Objects Everywhere and Taligent’s approach, according to SunSoft’s Tribble, is that while CommonPoint has hundreds of frameworks and thousands of objects, Distributed Objects Everywhere users can get started with just 20 or 30 objects in a framework. Taligent has cut its objects into smaller pieces, says Tribble. For example, Distributed Objects Everywhere has a text object that includes descriptions for graphics and display – Taligent provides separate objects for each task. The operating syst em-independent OpenStep Application Programming Interface set supports X Window and NeXT Display PostScript. Moreover, the application programming interfaces – like those contained in IBM Corp’s Distributed Systems Object Model – can be expressed in the Common Object Request Broker Architecture Interface Definition Language, the Object Group’s proposed lingua franca of the object world. Eventually SunSoft will have all Distributed Objects Everywhere programming interfaces expressed in Interface Definition Language. The idea of the Interface Definition Language is to shield the architecture from specific language structures, including C++, that may come and go. Indeed it is precisely this Interface Definition Language that Microsoft Corp has railed against with its own construct. As previously reported, SunSoft will enhance its Workshop C++ development environment for Distributed Objects Everywhere. It will include Interface Definition Language compilers, a distributed debugger, Objective/C compiler, a NeXTstep interface builder and other tools still under wraps that will, for example, create objects specifically to be shared on a network, with built-in administration hooks.
Dovetailed
Although the first OpenStep release will come in full-flavoured Objective/C, the chosen language of NeXTstep, Workshop tools will support mixed C++ and Objective/C object development for the Distributed Objects Everywhere application environment. As Objective/C is only ANSI C plus one extra syntax for message-sending, training issues are not as problematic as its competitors would have us all believe, Tribble claims. In the long run, OpenStep application programming interfaces will be fully-defined in Interface Definition Language. Cross system integration with Object Linking & Embedding and the Windows world will be handled by an implementation of Iona Technologies Ltd’s Orbix object request broker for OpenStep. SunSoft is currently working with an unamed partner, or partners, to do a tool for bringing data into its object environment for processing using decision support and query tools. The idea is to create UniSQL-style tools that can access relational, object and legacy d
ata stores. Not much got axed from SunSoft’s pre-NeXT object development effort, Tribble claims. There was not an awful lot there and what was has dovetailed into the OpenStep effort.
