ParcPlace Systems Inc’s $45m acquisition of Digitalk Inc (CI No 2,669) should be complete by the end of August; the combined company will be known as ParcPlace-DigiTalk Inc with annual revenues of some $55m. There will upgraded versions of ParcPlace VisualWorks and Digitalk Visual Smalltalk Enterprise development systems next quarter, with full language and syntax compatibility between the two. The company has already decided to use the VisualWorks Smalltalk engine as its long-term strategic technology base, and will – also in the fourth quarter – detail a roadmap of Smalltalk language classes for inclusion in a single product line, code-named Van Gogh, by the middle of next year. The company said it will continue to support Visual Smalltalk Enterprise, at least until all its functionality is included in VisualWorks. DigiTalk technologies that will survive into the single offering include the Parts workbench and visual wiring programme, Team/V development (maintaining support for Object Technology Inc’s Envy/Developer), Smalltalk link libraries, Windows95 compliance and legacy integration. ParcPlace-DigiTalk will create additional support for Object Linking & Embedding, Systems Object Model/Distributed Systems Object Model and Common Object Request Broker Architecture, optimised server enhancements and a class library enabling developers to plug different libraries into their environment. The technology is to appear in two other product directions: Wadsworth, an Internet module enabling users to deploy applications on the Web, and a server-centric VisualWorks implementation code-named ServerWorks. ParcPlace-Digitalk promises the net result will be a more comprehensive Smalltalk development system than Hewlett-Packard Co’s Distributed Smalltalk bundle of distributed and object functions implemented on top of VisualWorks. Automatic generation of client and server components and other remote features will appear in VisualWorks 2.5 – the first step down the ServerWorks road – which the company said should be ready by the end of this year.
