As the submission won the vote last month of the Object Management Group’s Technical Committee (CI No 2,554), it should come as no surprise that the Object Group’s board duly gave its blessing to the Sun Microsystems Inc-backed Universal Networked Objects proposal as the way to go for CORBA 2 interoperability. Universal Networked Objects, the TCP/IP-based proposal from Sun, Iona Technologies Ltd, Expersoft Corp, Bell Northern Research, ICL Plc and IBM Corp, won hands down, by a vote of 15 to four. The vote was secret, so the identity of the four naysayers is uncertain though not impossible to guess considering the fury Digital Equipment Corp exhibited in trying to get its opposing Common Interoperability Object Request Broker specification accepted in Universal Networked Objects’ place. DEC was joined by Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM, which had a foot in both camps. As a result, the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment Remote Procedure Call is now in the public domain. If the decision, seen as a serious political loss to Microsoft Corp, had gone the other way, there is no doubt Microsoft would by now be making hay on which the Object Group could eventually have choked to death. It could have claimed its Common Object Model to be close enough to Distributed Computing Environment technology that the Object Group services would be of no future use to it. The Object Group’s board also sanctioned six other services specifications at the meeting, including relationships, object transaction (through a single interface), concurrency controls, externalisation, C++ mapping and – none too soon – initialisation, so now everyone agrees on how to start a request. The Object Group’s initialisation scheme was submitted by Bell Northern Research, DEC, Expersoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ICL, Iona and Sun. The C++ mapping device came from DEC, Expersoft, Hewlett-Packard, Iona, Novell Inc and SunSoft Inc. The anticipated Common Object Model-to-Common Object Request Broker Architecture Request for Proposals, which was expected to be posted just about now, has been delayed until Microsoft can get its documentation together.

Ought to back off for now

The Request requirements cannot be detailed without technical documents that do not yet exist. Although that is a rather euphemistic interpretation of the events, both the Object Group and Sun’s object chief, Bud Tribble, believe that for this particular process to mature – effectively Microsoft’s first venture to the bike shed in this part of the industry’s playground – then the industry ought to back off for now. Whether the documentation pertains to technology that may not yet exist, even on paper, or behaviour that is not yet fully understood, Microsoft will certainly have to present Object Group members with a clearer picture of its distributed future. This might be ‘OLE3’ or Cairo – presuming it is not going to convert its own Microsoft Interface Definition Language to the Object Group’s Interface Definition Language. The Object Group meets again in January in Santa Cruz; Microsoft is making noises about having paper ready for March. Meanwhile, the Object Group scored a little victory when the International Standards Organisation’s Open Distributed Processing Group, also known as SC21, voted to adopt the Object Group’s specifications by reference, meaning that it will not have to mess around with them and will automatically subsume them as its own. The Object Group’s next big issue surrounds the security Request for Proposals that ICL is racing to snare (CI No 2,554).