Distributed Objects Everywhere - Spring, DOE, OpenStep, NEO

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 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.