At this week’s ObjectWorld show in San Francisco, SunSoft Inc will announce initial shipments of an External Developers Release of its Distributed Objects Everywhere system, a key component of the company’s long-planned strategy to move to a full object-oriented paradigm, today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X reports. The Objects Everywhere release includes SunSoft’s Distributed Object Management Facility, an Object Management Group-compliant object request broker, and a set of object services, including naming, event notification, association and properties services, based on the joint object services submission to the Object Group in February, which was backed by 20 companies and uses the Sun-developed Interface Definition Language, also an Object Group standard. The Distributed Object Management Facility, the object services, plus other development tools featured in the Distributed Objects Everywhere release, will enable independent software vendors and in-house software developers to begin creating distributed applications using objects, the company says. The Management Facility provides basic communication and management services and forms the backbone of the Sun project, facilitating transport and location-independent access to objects, enabling objects to communicate with each other regardless of their location. SunSoft says that until now, complicated code has been required to make distributed applications work properly across the network. This release, it says, enables developers to integrate existing applications and create new objects that will interoperate with each other, positioning it as the means of migrating from Solaris to a full distributed object environment. SunSoft’s industry-backed ToolTalk interapplication mechanism was the first prong of project Distributed Objects Everywhere. SunSoft will offer the release free to software developers and end users – development versions ship at the end of the month, beta releases will go out in October, with general availability planned for the beginning of next year.
