Iona Technologies Ltd will unveil Orbix – described as the first full implementation of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture – at the Object World trade show in June. Colin Newman, business manager of the Dublin, Eire company acknowledges the other object managers already in the market from the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co and Hyperdesk Inc, but argues that Orbix is the first CORBA-compliant one to be built from scratch and as such scores in terms of size and efficiency. Moreover it is the first to offer direct hooks to the C++ programming language and last Friday, Iona, Sunsoft Inc and Hewlett-Packard made a joint submission to the Object Management Group proposing a standard C++ CORBA interface. Iona sees US-based in-house software developers as its largest market. Prices have yet to be set, but the company says that it is looking at $3,000 to $5,000 for a development kit and around $100 per user for run-time use.
