TALIGENT, the operating system company set up by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Apple to develop the next generation of 32-bit object-oriented software and development tools, announced details of its first product at the Comdex trade show yesterday.
Common Point is an object-orientated application development environment that will be available for HPUX, IBM AIX, IBM OS/2, and Apple Macintosh operating systems.
According to Rick Jackson, product line manager at Taligent, Common Point takes an inheritance approach to object computing in which an object, such as an order form, for example, can be copied and altered to form a new object. The new object can then be used by any application without alteration to the new object.
Changes to the original parent object will also be reflected in the new child. Taligent also takes it one step further, with what it calls a frameworks model. Here, frameworks are cohesive collections of objects for specific functions such as text processing.
'We've brought the concept of use-ability one level higher,' Mr Jackson said.
'The key is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.' Developers can add to or alter the frameworks and their internal objects so that not only functionality of objects but the underlying basis of that functionality can be changed.
For instance, in a text processing framework designed for European alphabets, changing the basis to 16-bit coding for Asian languages would then be reflected in all the objects in the frame work.