As well as the Visual Edge Ltd contingent – a party we’re told Taligent Inc is likely to join when it gets it act together – a second grouping of Expersoft Corp, Sybase Inc and Genesis Development; plus Digital Equipment Corp and Fujitsu Ltd have each submitted proposals to Part A of the Object Management Group’s Request for Proposals. Microsoft Corp has not joined, despite the Visual Edge team’s best efforts to woo it (and turning Microsoft’s pal DEC out of their San Jose meeting probably didn’t help). Microsoft can still, of course, reply to Part B of the Request for Proposals – letters of intent for which are due by October 24 – which calls for Distributed Object Linking & Embedding-to-Common Object Request Broker Architecture inter operability mechanisms. It’s between now and then that the jockeying for position and consolidation among the Part A submitters will take place. Whichever way you look at it, the Object Group needs a map to go from one world to another, says Visual Edge’s president Mike Foody, who argues that the whole Common Object Request Broker Architecture initiative has become mixed up in a debate over wrappers and protocols.
