SAN MATEO (09-23-95) - Five years ago, SunSoft Inc. wanted objects everywhere. This year it wants to get on the Internet. As of next month, the company will get both when it finally delivers its distributed object framework.
After five years of development, SunSoft next month will finally install the distributed object plumbing -- known until this week as Distributed Objects Everywhere -- in its Solaris version of Unix.
Now renamed Neo, the new OS services will let developers for its Solaris operating system build distributed, object-oriented applications and use the Java development language to tie them to the Internet.
Neo is built on a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)- compliant core that handles communication among objects both on a stand- alone system and across the network.
The upgrade with Neo built in, Solaris Neo, will ship next month priced at US$990. Corporate developers can begin developing Neo applications with the $11,995 WorkShop for Neo, which will be replaced early next year by the OpenStep development environment that Sun licensed from Next Computer Inc.
SunSoft says Neo will outperform other CORBA-based services, such as Expersoft Corp.'s PowerBroker, because Neo is bolted directly into the OS. But PowerBroker and other third-party object request brokers can be used with any of several Unix OSes running on multiple hardware platforms, while Neo works only with Solaris on Sparc and Intel chips, said Melinda Ballou, analyst at Meta Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn.
Still, SunSoft, a division of Sun Microsystems Inc., has its affinity for the Internet to set it off from the crowd, observers said.
Now in alpha testing, Java is designed to let users create Internet applications that tap into Neo back-end services. SunSoft envisions corporations opening up their data to customers in Neo apps that can be accessed by any Java-enabled Internet browsers, officials said. In addition to Sun's own HotJava, Netscape Communications Corp. will debut such a browser in December.
"We can provide Internet access to our corporate data without Java or Next's Web Object Frameworks, but having Java and Neo tied together allows the application developer to have better control over what type of data can be pulled and pushed outside the corporation," said Hide Horiuchi, architecture planning manager at AT&T Wireless, in Kirkland, Wash.
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