Distributed Objects Everywhere

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Distributed Objects Everywhere (DOE) was a long-running

Enterprise JavaBeans
.

Background

In the early 1990s the 'next big thing' in computing was to use desktop

GUI
.

It seemed that the proper split of duties would be to have a cooperative set of objects, the workstation being responsible for display and user interaction, with processing on the server. Standing in the way of this sort of solution was the massive differences in operating systems and programming languages between platforms. While it might be possible to build such a system that would work on any one combination of workstation and server, the same solution would not work on any other system.

Oddly, the differences between any two

procedure calls, the file formats that they generated were often quite different. In general terms, it was not always possible to write different portions of a program in different languages, although doing so often has real utility. The problem was not so acute on minicomputers
and mainframes where the vendor often specified standards for their libraries, but on microcomputers the programming systems were generally delivered by a variety of 3rd party companies with no interest in standardization.

Nevertheless, this problem was being addressed in the early 1990s through the introduction of various

interface definition language
, or IDL, to allow any language on the platform to understand the code inside the library.

Extending these systems to support

CORBA
flavors. Sun, attempting to position itself as the future IBM in terms of backoffice support, felt they had to attack this market as well.

Spring, DOE, OpenStep, NEO

Sun's solution was based on work in their Spring operating system, which used intercommunicating objects for almost all programming tasks. Modifying this to work under a 'traditional' Unix like Solaris was not all that difficult, although Unix makes the assumption that all programs run locally, and an interface for remote access had to be added. For this, DOE added an object request broker (ORB) that ran on the backoffice servers, listening for DOE requests and handing them off to the proper program to be handled. During development, CORBA became a key buzzword in the industry. This prompted a delay while the ORB 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

Solaris) operating system and associated SunView and X window systems were 'plain C' based, while their newer NeWS windowing environment was based on a network-extensible object oriented dialect of PostScript
.

In order to supply a comprehensive and flexible object programming solution, Sun turned to NeXT and the two developed OpenStep. The idea was to have OpenStep programs calling DOE objects on Sun servers, providing a backoffice-to-frontoffice solution on Sun machines. OpenStep was not released until 1993, further delaying the project.

By the time DOE, now known as NEO, was released in 1995,

Enterprise JavaBeans.[3]

Although distributed objects, and CORBA in particular, were the "next big thing" in the early 1990s, by the second half of the decade interest in them had essentially disappeared.[

Browser User Interfaces
").

References

  1. ^ "SunSoft Introduces NEO, the Industry's First Complete Networked Object Computing Environment" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. September 20, 1995. Archived from the original on 2007-03-11. Retrieved 2006-12-13.
  2. ^ "Sun Announces Product that Connects Java to Business Applications" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. March 26, 1996. Archived from the original on 2007-03-20. Retrieved 2006-12-13.
  3. ^ Robert McMillan; Niall McKay (November 14, 1997). "Goodbye NEO, hello Enterprise Java Beans". SunWorld. Retrieved 2013-05-01.

External links

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