InformationWeek

November 10, 1997

Objects For Windows

ObjectStore database adds functionality, plus toolkit for COM

bject Design Inc. this week will introduce a toolkit to help developers link Windows applications to its ObjectStore database. Object Design will also announce an upgrade to ObjectStore that offers additional functionality for Java developers, plus other features.

Officials with Object Design in Burlington, Mass., say Active Toolkit and ObjectStore 5.1 make ObjectStore a better platform for component-based apps developed by Windows and Java programmers.

Justin Perreault, Object Design's chief operating officer, says three trends work in the company's favor: three-tiered computing using Internet standards; object-oriented programming; and object standards such as Corba, JavaBeans, and Microsoft's ActiveX and COM. "As more and more IT organizations are shifting to this type of architecture, it opens up a whole new market for us," says Perreault.

Object D esign's revenue rose 27.5% in the first nine months of the year, to $35.3 million. Customers in the third quarter included Barclays, Excite, Knight Ridder, NextLink, MCI, Sprint, and Vanguard Group.

More than half of Object Design's customers are Windows developers, Perreault says. Active Toolkit is intended to provide a COM interface for building ObjectStore applications using Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, or other COM-compliant tools. It supports OLE DB, a Microsoft interface intended to let applications pull different types of data from a variety of data stores. Using Active Toolkit, developers can write applications that access ObjectStore data from OLE DB-compliant desktop tools.

Joshua Duhl, principal of Stillpoint Consulting in Arlington, Mass., which specializes in object technology, says Active Toolkit will make ObjectStore more accessible to Windows developers. "Historically, that's been a problem for all the object databases," says Duhl. Active Toolkit, available now, runs on Windows NT and costs $1,900 per developer.

NBC's Interactive Media division uses ObjectStore to collect data from its Web site and will use Active Toolkit to let analysts with Microsoft applications access that data. "We're looking to Active Toolkit to make it an almost trivial process," says Dave Britton, director of production with the NBC unit in New York.

Object Design's database upgrade, ObjectStore 5.1, will ship in December. ObjectStore's Java interface is being brought into compliance with the Object Database Management Group's Java interface standard. Database functions such as replication, failover, and multiversion concurrency control are being extended to Java developers. ObjectStore 5.1 will also ship with support for the XA transaction standard, making it possible to coordinate transactions between ObjectStore and other databases.

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