Distributed Objects Everywhere
Encyclopedia
Distributed Objects Everywhere (DOE) was a long-running Sun Microsystems
project to build a distributed computing
environment based on the CORBA
system in the 'back end' and OpenStep
as the user interface. First started in 1990 and announced soon thereafter, it remained vaporware
for many years before it was finally released as NEO in 1995. It was sold for only a short period before being dropped (along with OpenStep) in 1996. In its place is what is today known as Enterprise JavaBean
s.
s to display and edit data being provided by mainframes
and minicomputer
s. Although a number of methods for this sort of access already existed, the division of labor was not at all even. For instance, SQL
required the workstation to download huge data sets and then process them locally, whereas use of terminal emulator
s left all of the work to the server and provided no 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 system
s and programming language
s 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 programming language
s on a single platform was almost as great. Each language had its own format for passing parameters into 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 minicomputer
s 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 shared library systems. These were actually intended to ease resource use on smaller platforms, by allowing a number of programs using a common resource, like the GUI, to share a single copy of code instead of each loading a separate copy into memory. As a side effect of being able to be called from many programs, these systems also defined a standard way to call them, using an interface definition language, or IDL, to allow any language on the platform to understand the code inside the library.
Extending these systems to support remote procedure call
s behind the scenes was seen as a natural evolution, providing a solution to the client/server programming problem. At the time there were a number of major projects to deliver such a system, including IBM
's System Object Model
(SOM/DSOM), NeXT
's Portable Distributed Objects
, Microsoft
's Component Object Model
(COM/DCOM) and many 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.
, 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 C++
object libraries were becoming common on some platforms, their own SunOS
(later known as Solaris
) operating system and associated SunView
and X
window systems were 'plain C' based. 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, Sun had already moved on to Java
as their next big thing. Java was now the GUI of choice for client-side applications, and Sun's OpenStep plans were quietly dropped (see Lighthouse Design
). NEO was re-positioned as a Java system with the introduction of Joe, but it saw little use.
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. Web-based applications running entirely on the server became the new 'next big thing', and the need for a powerful display system on the client-side was simply dropped and replaced by lightweight GUIs based on HTML
.
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
project to build a distributed computing
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
environment based on the CORBA
Çorba
Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
system in the 'back end' and OpenStep
OpenStep
OpenStep was an object-oriented application programming interface specification for an object-oriented operating system that used a non-NeXTSTEP operating system as its core, principally developed by NeXT with Sun Microsystems. OPENSTEP was a specific implementation of the OpenStep API developed...
as the user interface. First started in 1990 and announced soon thereafter, it remained vaporware
Vaporware
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted,...
for many years before it was finally released as NEO in 1995. It was sold for only a short period before being dropped (along with OpenStep) in 1996. In its place is what is today known as Enterprise JavaBean
Enterprise JavaBean
Enterprise JavaBeans is a managed, server-side component architecture for modular construction of enterprise applications.The EJB specification is one of several Java APIs in the Java EE specification. EJB is a server-side model that encapsulates the business logic of an application...
s.
Background
In the early 1990s the 'next big thing' in computing was to use desktop microcomputerMicrocomputer
A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...
s to display and edit data being provided by mainframes
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
and minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s. Although a number of methods for this sort of access already existed, the division of labor was not at all even. For instance, SQL
SQL
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
required the workstation to download huge data sets and then process them locally, whereas use of terminal emulator
Terminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
s left all of the work to the server and provided no GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...
.
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 system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s and programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
s 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 programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
s on a single platform was almost as great. Each language had its own format for passing parameters into 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 minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s 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 shared library systems. These were actually intended to ease resource use on smaller platforms, by allowing a number of programs using a common resource, like the GUI, to share a single copy of code instead of each loading a separate copy into memory. As a side effect of being able to be called from many programs, these systems also defined a standard way to call them, using an interface definition language, or IDL, to allow any language on the platform to understand the code inside the library.
Extending these systems to support remote procedure call
Remote procedure call
In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...
s behind the scenes was seen as a natural evolution, providing a solution to the client/server programming problem. At the time there were a number of major projects to deliver such a system, including IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
's System Object Model
System Object Model
In computing, the System Object Model is an object-oriented shared library system developed by IBM. DSOM, a distributed version based on CORBA, allowed objects on different computers to communicate.-Applications:...
(SOM/DSOM), NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
's Portable Distributed Objects
Portable Distributed Objects
Portable Distributed Objects, or PDO, is a programming API for creating object-oriented code that can be executed remotely on a network of computers. It was created by NeXT Computer, Inc. using their OpenStep system, whose use of Objective-C made the package very easy to write...
, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's Component Object Model
Component Object Model
Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...
(COM/DCOM) and many CORBA
Çorba
Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
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 systemSpring operating system
Spring was an experimental microkernel-based object oriented operating system developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Using technology substantially similar to concepts developed in the Mach kernel, Spring concentrated on providing a richer programming environment supporting multiple...
, 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
Object request broker
In distributed computing, an object request broker is a piece of middleware software that allows programmers to make program calls from one computer to another via a network...
(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
Buzzword
A buzzword is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that is used in the media and wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context....
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 C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
object libraries were becoming common on some platforms, their own SunOS
SunOS
SunOS is a version of the Unix operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The SunOS name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4 of SunOS...
(later known as Solaris
Solaris Operating System
Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010....
) operating system and associated SunView
SunView
SunView was a windowing system from Sun Microsystems developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation; unlike later UNIX windowing systems, much of it was implemented in the system kernel...
and X
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
window systems were 'plain C' based. In order to supply a comprehensive and flexible object programming solution, Sun turned to NeXT and the two developed OpenStep
OpenStep
OpenStep was an object-oriented application programming interface specification for an object-oriented operating system that used a non-NeXTSTEP operating system as its core, principally developed by NeXT with Sun Microsystems. OPENSTEP was a specific implementation of the OpenStep API developed...
. 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, Sun had already moved on to Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
as their next big thing. Java was now the GUI of choice for client-side applications, and Sun's OpenStep plans were quietly dropped (see Lighthouse Design
Lighthouse Design
Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in...
). NEO was re-positioned as a Java system with the introduction of Joe, but it saw little use.
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. Web-based applications running entirely on the server became the new 'next big thing', and the need for a powerful display system on the client-side was simply dropped and replaced by lightweight GUIs based on HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
.