Over the past four years Taligent Inc’s CommonPoint has had an uneasy relationship with OpenDoc – too similar to be complementary, too different to work together. Finally, it looks as though IBM Corp might try to do something about it. Ian Simpson, IBM’s programme director of application development in Europe, the Middle East and Asia told our sister publication PowerPC News that the new IBM-owned Taligent is going to try and get the two working together by amending some Taligent application programming interfaces. Taligent was always conceived as a pure object-oriented development system, whereas OpenDoc is more pragmatic – enabling more conventional code to be ‘objectised’ by encapsulating it within ‘containers’. IBM hopes that it will be possible to embed Taligent object frameworks inside OpenDoc containers. This sounds like something of a bastardisation of Taligent’s goals, but at least it means that objects could be deployed in a more phased way and integrated more easily with, say the OS/2 Workplace. If the work goes as planned, Simpson says it is possible that the resulting code will be of use to Apple Computer Inc, enabling it to use Taligent frameworks within Mac-based OpenDoc implementations. There is no word at present on how the application programming interface changes could affect any existing Taligent users.
