ExperTelligence Inc, Santa Barbara, California has signed the Paris-based Alcatel ISR unit of Alcatel NV to a co-operative agreement under which the two companies will develop portable versions of ExperTelligence’s Action! and ExperAction! software engineering interface tools that will be able to run in a variety of environments using ISR’s C-based Spoke object-oriented development system. The aim is to offer a smooth transition from the specialised Lisp language in which ExperTelligence majors, to widely-used C. The agreement also covers joint marketing and sales efforts for the distribution of the resulting combined Spoke-Action! products in Europe by ISR and in North America by ExperTelligence. Alcatel is also taking a stake in ExperTelligence and will get a seat on its Scientific Advisory Council. Spoke is claimed to be the first and only C-based object-oriented system that simultaneously offers dynamic class creation, incremental compilation, multiple inheritance and full acces to any C function. It was developed by Alcatel parent Compagnie Generale D’Electricite SA’s Marcoussis Laboratories and took over 100 man-years to develop; it is already in use at Aerospatiale SA, the Paris Police Department and the French Army. ExperTelligence’s Action! – an interactive object-oriented graphical user interface and application development tool that currently runs on Texas Instruments microExplorer and Apple Macintosh machines, is used in applications such as gate schedules for several major air carriers, for the automation of after-hours trading on the Chicago Board of Trade, and in manufacturing systems for Douglas Aircraft Co. ExperTelligence reckons that when combined with Spoke, it will be possible to build applications 10 times faster than previously, and that the resulting applications will be able to be integrated with or in any C language program. They will also, the company claims, be automatically portable from one computer to another, using the X Window System, SunView, the Macintosh environment, Presentation Manager or Motif.
