Texas Instruments Inc is offering documentation and application programming interfaces to its Composer software engineering program to encourage independent software vendors to write for the environment. The programming interfaces expose Texas Instruments’s Composer Encyclopaedia, which stores client or server application models, supposedly a nascent version of the object-oriented repository it is developing for Cairo. The programming interfaces are free to Texas Instruments’s Open Initiative members. It says it has already won over half a dozen new companies, including Compuer Associates International Inc, Legent Corp, ObjectWare Inc, Informix Software Inc, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, and the last will link its Softbench tools to Composer. The Composer by IEF, Information Engineering Facility, development environment will be up under Digital Unix by July. Users will be able to deploy Composer applications under Digital Unix or OpenVMS. Prices for it start from $10,000. Composer will not support Microsoft’s SQL 6.0, the initial release of the SQL 95 database, it is waiting for the more robust SQL 6.1, due by the end of the year.
