Original SunWorld Online Page[1]
Object World: Products focus on CORBA standards
Hewlett-Packard, GemStone, and others expand CORBA integration
San Jose, CA -- At the Object World West show, vendors announced a slew
of new products based on Object Management Group's industry standard for
building interoperable enterprise software architectures for the
Internet.
The CORBAnet Initiative focuses on the Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA) 2.0 and aims to foster unity among operating system
software and object request brokers (ORBs) from leading CORBA vendors in
order to create an industry standard that will allow many applications
to interoperate over the World Wide Web.
Some of the more significant CORBA-related announcements...
* Hewlett-Packard Co., of Palo Alto, CA, introduced two new features of
its HP ORB Plus 2.0 object request broker (ORB) aimed at supporting
interoperability between systems and simplifying Unix and Windows NT
integration. HP ORB, which is a CORBA 2.0-compliant C++ ORB for Sun
Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT platforms, will be now be enhanced
with wizards allowing programmers to create CORBA objects more
quickly and will feature interoperability between OLE/COM and CORBA.
* GemStone Systems Inc., of Beaverton, OR, announced that it will
implement DNS Technologies Inc.'s CORBA 2.0 technology to extend the
capabilities of the GemStone Object Application Server, which is
used to develop and deploy large-scale enterprise computing
applications. The CORBA implementations created out of this joint
partnership will be built on the CORBA-specified Object Transaction
Service.
* Suite Software, of Anaheim, CA, introduced Distributed Object
Management Environment (DOME) release 3.3 and announced it will
bring the DOME ORB into compliance with CORBA 2.0 specifications.
DOME is a set of middleware application tools that combine
asynchronous messaging, an ORB and distributed object services which
work with development tools such as C, C++, and COBOL.
* Persistence Software Inc., of San Mateo, CA, announced the
availability of Orbix Interface Generator which automates the
integration of Iona Technologies Inc.'s Orbix CORBA-compliant ORB
with the Persistence object-to-relational application server, which
will enable programmers to develop object applications with
relational database access. Iona and Persistence will partner to
integrate several of their object technologies to build
CORBA-compliant applications accessible by Web browsers.
* Hongkong Telecom IMS Ltd. announced at Object World that it will use
Iona Technologies Inc.'s Orbix and OrbixWeb object request brokers
to build its Interactive Multimedia Services, a video-on-demand
service based on set-top boxes.
Hongkong Telecom IMS, which launched an online service called
Netvigator in the beginning of 1996, represents the largest
deployment to date based on Java and the common object request
broker architecture (CORBA), said Annrai O'Toole, chief technology
officer of Iona.
* Several vendors have announced technologies built on the standard in
recent months, including SunSoft, whose Joe is a Java application
that links any database or client/server application to a Web-based
client, and Netscape Communications Corp., whose Netscape One is a
Java-based platform for building interoperable Internet applications
currently supported by more than 50 vendors.
In other news, Rational Software Corp., of Santa Clara, CA, announced
that Microsoft Corp. will cooperate with and support Rational in the
development of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a graphical
object-modeling language that Rational hopes to have approved by the OMG
in order to unify object-modeling techniques.
New York-based Popkin Software and Systems Inc. unveiled SA/CRC Cards
enabling object-oriented analysis of systems and announced it has added
the capability to generate CORBA IDL code from a class diagram with its
object-oriented analysis and design tool, SA Object.
Reich Technologies, of Paoli, PA, introduced the Project Information
Environment (PIE) for the object-oriented tool suite, the Intelligent
Software Factory, which allows managers to link project planning
information directly to the work products of the software development
lifecycle.
Ontos Inc., of Lowell, MA, announced that it will add support for Java
to its Object Integration Server (Ontos OIS) middleware and DB/Explorer
database products and will market Ontos OIS software for Windows NT.
Ontos also announced that it has expanded Ontos OIS to include support
for all Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant databases, including
Informix, CA/Ingres, Progress and IBM's DB2. --Kristi Essick, IDG News
Service
Resources
* Object World West[2] home page http://www.omg.org/ow/owwest.htm
* GemStone Systems Inc.[3] http://www.gemstone.com/
* Hewlett-Packard Co.[4] http://www.hp.com/
* Object Management Group[5] http://www.omg.org/
* Ontos Inc.[6] http://www.ontos.com/
* Persistence Software Inc.[7] http://www.persistence.com/
* Popkin Software and Systems Inc.[8] http://www.popkin.com/
* Rational Software Corp.[9] http://www.rational.com/
* Suite Software[10] http://www.suite.com/
* IONA Technologies[11] http://www.iona.com/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-08-1996/swol-08-corba.html
[2] http://www.omg.org/ow/owwest.htm
[3] http://www.gemstone.com/
[4] http://www.hp.com/
[5] http://www.omg.org/
[6] http://www.ontos.com/
[7] http://www.persistence.com/
[8] http://www.popkin.com/
[9] http://www.rational.com/
[10] http://www.suite.com/
[11] http://www.iona.com/