IBM Corp is attempting to get its OS/2 Warp application programming interface extensions out into the developer community before Microsoft Corp’s Windows95 is released. Alpha testing has started with some software developers, to be followed by beta later in the summer, but the extensions will not be generally available until the end of the year, the company said. They will eventually ship as part of OS/2 Warp. At the IBM Technical Interchange conference in New Orleans, the company showcased the range of extensions and tools for software developers to capitalise on what the company claimed was the rapidly expanding OS/2 market. The extensions are designed to widen the appeal and usefulness of OS/2 Warp, the most popular 32-bit operating system, IBM charac terised it – before Microsoft Corp’s Windows95 is unleashed in August. Any 32-bit Windows applications that has one of the 700 interfaces defined in the set can be recompiled as an OS/2 Warp application, according to the company. However, 16-bit Windows applications have to be converted to 32-bit Windows and then to OS/2 Warp. In order to ease the conversion process, IBM has licensed a Source Migration Analysis Reporting Toolset, or SMART from OneUp Corp of Dallas, Texas. The tool determines the ease, or otherwise, of converting existing Windows code – both 16-bit and 32-bit – and 16-bit OS/2 code, and converts the majority of it to 32-bit OS/2 Warp-type code. It will indicate which parts of a Win32 application can use the interface extensions, and make recommendations for the rest of the development process, as IBM obliquely put it. VisualAge C++ for OS/2 Warp and the object-oriented Open Class Library are due at the end of the month. The company claimed that the two products enable developers, writing under OS/2 Warp, to implement their applications under AIX, OS/400, MVS or Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris operating systems. Support for Apple Computer Inc’s Power Macintosh and Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP-UX is promised, but nobody at IBM was able to give any time frame for this. VisualAge C++ will be released for Windows95 and Windows NT later in the year, though again, there was nothing more specific. The compiler will support the OpenDoc backplane framework, which will enable developers to create objects tha t are reusable under OS/2 Warp, Windows and AIX as well as Mac OS, the company claimed. VisualAge C++ for OS/2 Warp will cost #245 for the CD-ROM version, rising to #285 if you insist on disks and paper manuals. The company also previewed Hyperwise, an editor for creating the help portion of applications for OS/2 Warp or Windows 3.1. No dates or prices given.
