Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s client integration division has lifted the lid a little on a slew of new Vision technologies that are designed to support a user’s desktop working environment better, whether that be X, character, Java, Windows or Web fro m wherever the user needs to get at it. It is similar to the technique Network Computer vendors are developing to store details of a user’s desktop preferences on a credit card and have any Network Computer device bring that up when the contents of the card are loaded. In Santa Cruz’s case it is minus the card of course and includes asynchronous application access from any geographically-located device. Santa Cruz says it will enable a user to suspend communication with the back-end Unix server without losing the session. A mobile user could carry on work while unplugged and have the same session updated when reconnected to a network; it will also support lost links and unanticipated disconnects. If it all sounds a bit vague, then that i s because Santa Cruz is still trying to refine the message it wants to get across when the products are announced in July. Proxy dupes Windows Initially, the company has unveiled Santa Cruz Server Object Linking & Embedding which provides developers with a Remote Object Linking & Embedding technology for integrating Unix applications with Windows. Essentially, a proxy dupes Windows applications into thinking they are dealing with other Microsoft applications when in fact they are accessing applications on Unix servers. It is the reverse of the Santa Cruz-IXI Wintif technology which dupes Motif applications into thinking they are inte racting with other Motif applications when in fact they are performing actions on Windows applications. Santa Cruz Server Object Linking & Embedding, now available for evaluation on the Web for Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Santa Cruz Unixes, grew out of Santa Cruz-IXI’s Eye2Eye technology and is part of the company’s Highwayman strategy to provide access to Unix applications from Windows. Santa Cruz says it enables Visual Basic and other Windows developers to implement remote Object Linking & Embedding automation in Unix applications written in C, C++, Cobol and Tcl, enabling direct calls to internal functions on the Unix server from Windows applications. Micro Focus Plc has already announced support for it. Santa Cruz says its main competition is not from the likes of Software AG which will take eons implementing Distributed COM for Unix, or the Wabis of the world, but from Microsoft Corp itself when it gets Network Object Linking & Embedding out, and the Mainsoft Corps and Bristol Technology Incs that have licensed Network Object Linking & Embedding, the difference being that they still require Unix applications to be re-written for Object Linking & Embedding, Santa Cruz cla ims. It is seeking to overturn conventional X server providers such as Hummingbird Communications Ltd. Further plans for the Vision line include embedding the TermVision Unix emulator in Web pages, Vision FS for file transfer and Vision Communicatio n modules. To date, Microsoft has failed to deliver the distributed Object Linking & Embedding technology it promised.
