Distributed Objects Everywhere: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:14, 22 June 2005

Revision as of 21:44, 5 January 2006

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During the early DOE efforts, CORBA became a key [[buzzword]], prompting a delay while the system was re-engineered for CORBA support. Under the CORBA model different objects, like those from DOE or SOM, would be able to interact by sharing a common interface.

A bigger problem for Sun is that they had no integrated desktop object programming solution. Although [[C plus plus|C++]] was common, their own SunView and Solaris operating systems were all "plain C" based. In order to supply a comprehensive and flexible object programming solution, Sun turned to OpenStep. The idea was to have OpenStep programs calling DOE objects on their servers, providing a backoffice-to-frontoffice solution on Sun machines. OpenStep was only released in 1993, further delaying the project.

By the time DOE, now known as NEO, was released in 1995, Sun had already moved onto [[Java programming language|Java]] as their next big thing. Java was now the GUI of choice for client-side applications, so NEO was re-positioned as a Java system with the introduction of '''Joe''', but it saw little use. OpenStep support was quietly dropped that year, and as it seemed the market for client/server objects never appeared, the entire effort ended with little to show for it.