Digital Equipment Corp last week unveiled four implementations of ObjectBroker, for IBM Corp MVS, OS/400, Silicon Graphics Inc’s Irix and Windows95. This will enable ObjectBroker to encapsulate applications on MVS servers with minimal source code changes and make them accessible from Visual Basic and other Object Linking & Embedding tools and desktop applications. DEC will offer CICS and IMS object adaptors for use with ObjectBroker over the next six months. DEC was also showing an early version of the 2.6 rev of ObjectBroker that will include the Distributed Computing Environment Generic Security Services Application Programming Interface, permitting use of third party Kerberos packages with ObjectBroker. It will include CORBA 2.0 C++ bindings – or at least as much as is there now; holes in the spec will be plugged with DEC technology. It will enable remote access to unmodified CORBA object servers from Windows95 and NT desktops through OLE Automation, Controls and custom interfaces. But won’t be CORBA 2.0 compatibile. It will include the same DEC-proprietary Remote Procedure Call mechanism as in 2.5. DEC said it will implement CORBA 2.0’s mandated Inter-Object Request Broker Protocol or the EISOP, the optional connection-oriented Distributed Computing Environment Procedure Call that is based on the Open Software Foundation’s application environment specification – or maybe both – by the end of next year, but it said there’s no demand from customers and it will not move until there is. ObjectBroker 2.6 enters beta testing later in the autumn and will ship in the first quarter of next year, from $5,000 per Unix developer licence to $150 for a personal computer client. Development and multiple client packages start at $20,000. ObjectBroker on MVS starts from $40,000; run-time licences are from $9,300. No prices for the OS/400 version. Both are out now. DEC is gearing its Desktop Connection object browser and services to run atop Microsoft Network OLE from later next year. Meantime, DEC has turned to I-Kinetics Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts, for access to Oracle and Sybase databases from ObjectBroker 2.6. I-Kinetic’s relational database management system component will supposedly provide functionality equivalent to Oracle Objects for Object Linking & Embedding or Microsoft Data Access Objects.
