The Lauchlan Angle

Object World conferences aren't what they used to be. I realised this as soon as I walked into the Hynes Convention Centre in Boston last week to be greeted by an enormous banner advert proclaiming the virtues of Microsoft's ActiveX software.

Microsoft? Object World? This is the company whose last significant contribution to an object trade show was to send one of its senior executives to be verbally beaten up by Apple's Steve Jobs in a rigged debate on the future of object-oriented software.

In the past, attendees at Object World could be assured of Object Management Group (OMG) bosses taking at least one swipe at Microsoft for going its own merry way with its Dcom and ActiveX technology. This year the rules had changed.

Like a terrorist who wakes up one morning to find himself hailed as a statesman, Microsoft was allocated one of the keynote addresses at the show. Typically, it abused this opportunity by turning it into a shameless product pitch, but the very presence of the company was significant.

'Time heals,' joked OMG president Chris Stone, source of some of the most barbed Microsoft criticism in years gone by. So does market reality.

The OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (Corba) is a remarkable achievement, but not so remarkable that it can see off a competitive offering from Microsoft.

So the future is co-existence: Microsoft on the desktop integrated with Corba implementations at the back end. It's a vision that analysts have been outlining for years, and this week it was articulated as OMG policy.

A proposal from Hewlett-Packard for standard bridging technology to link the two worlds is likely to be endorsed by both parties.

So, is it peace in our time? Well, maybe. A common theme at Object World was that, one way or another, 1997 is the crunch year for distributed object computing in general and Corba in particular. Dublin-based Iona recently achieved a highly successful flotation based on its expertise in object broking technology, while ICL is reaping the rewards of its multi-million pound distributed object deal with British Aerospace. Both support Corba.

But there needs to be a lot more focus in 1997 on providing Corba services, particularly in the area of security, to encourage widespread acceptance.

For example, distributed objects could give the cause of electronic commerce a much-needed boost, but only if security of transactions can be guaranteed.

Stone believes 1997 will be the year distributed objects gain commercial acceptance. I hope so. If they don't, they will in 1998, but by that time the chances are they'll be Microsoft objects and I'm not sure I can sit through many more ActiveX demos.