Object World: Products focus on CORBA standards Hewlett-Packard, GemStone, and others expand CORBA integration By Kristi Essick, IDG News Service

August  1996

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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
  http://www.omg.org/ow/owwest.htm
• GemStone Systems Inc.
  http://www.gemstone.com/
• Hewlett-Packard Co.
  http://www.hp.com/
• Object Management Group
  http://www.omg.org/
• Ontos Inc.
  http://www.ontos.com/
• Persistence Software Inc.
  http://www.persistence.com/
• Popkin Software and Systems Inc.
  http://www.popkin.com/
• Rational Software Corp.
  http://www.rational.com/
• Suite Software
  http://www.suite.com/
• IONA Technologies
  http://www.iona.com/

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