Topics under discussion at the Object Group meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, last week included transaction services and relationship services, and the Object Group’s common facilities task force held its first meeting there to discuss distributed compound documents. Relationship services examine ways of expressing how objects relate to each other in a database – for example, if a user looks at an employee object, the idea is the object can be linked seamlessly to another object to provide other relevant information like employer details, previous experience and so forth. Meanwhile the Object Group’s work on developing a transaction processing specification is gathering steam. The major participants in this effort are IBM, Tandem, Transarc, Novell, Iona, and SunSoft – ICL and Tivoli will also join in. They are all expected to support a single proposal, although each will develop its own implementation. Their aim is to speed up the ratification process – an important factor given that many of the database vendors are threatening to incorporate transaction processing capabilities into their databases. Final submissions for Corba 2.0 are due next month and will be discussed at the next Object Group meeting in Berlin in March.
