Object Design Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts is offering a slew of new Web-based application development tools. ObjectStore ObjectForms is claimed to support dynamic and interactive application creation for the Web, while a suite of six Object Managers will provide native support for text, audio, video, image, HyperText Mark-up Language data and Java applets. Targeted at the creation of Web-based applications which combine imaging, audio, video and textual data, Object Design claims it is not just another complex data type engine a la Oracle Corp’s Universal Server or Illustra but a pure object-oriented implementation that is better suited to managing extended relationships. European vice-president Jim Beagle admits that Illustra’s Web technology is broadly similar to Object Design’s but says Oracle and Illustra’s information delivery is pulled from separate data stores, resulting in comparatively poor performance. With relational structures, tables have to be joined manually, he says. With object databases relationships between the data stores provide better performance. ObjectForms comprises two components, a Web development framework, with dynamic HyperText Mark-up Language generator and run-time environment and WebConnect, which provides the communications to all HyperText Transfer Protocol servers and a dispatcher module from high volume Web applications. ObjectForms uses template files to automate presentation and processing of data for ObjectStore Web applications and the templates are HyperText Mark-up Language titles with extended HyperText Language tags designed for ObjectStore data access and presentation. The tags read template files to determine how to query or update ObjectStore and then dynamically generates HyperText Language to display the results. Then the resulting HyperText Language is sent straight to the Web Server which in turn sends the HTML to the Web browser. Extended HyperText Language tags are the key to controlling the presentation and customization of the ObjectStore Web application, says Object Design. ObjectForms is up under Windows NT and Solaris and HP-UX Unix.
Query-by-content
The Object Management suite consists of six class libraries for storing, querying, manipulating and re-using extended data types. The Image Object Manager module includes a query-by-content engine developed by Virage Inc, San Diego, California providing a system for retrieving images and video based on the image content rather than keywords. Virage is the company that helped Illustra to develop its Visual Intelligence image retrieval system. The Text Object manager comes with Verity Inc’s eponymous text retrieval engine – also an Illustra datablade – providing automatic indexing of all text. Object managers can be customized; and other ones will be added over time. Meantime, the anticipated asynchronous replication kit for failover with reading and limited writing facilities will appear in a point release of its ObjectStore database this quarter. Object Design is opening office number eight in Belgium; the others are in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia and Japan. It has 220 employees, down from 260 since its reorganization in August. It claims it has had two profitable quarters since.
