OpenDoc vs. OLE 2.0
IBM Personal Software Products
OpenDoc vs. OLE 2.0
Superior by Design
A Developer's View
January, 1994
Compound Document Architectures - OpenDoc and OLE 2.0
Compound document architectures are an important new type of
software platform. IBM is providing the analysis in this white
paper to help put the major compound document architectures:
OpenDoc(tm) and Object Linking and Embedding 2.0 (OLE 2.0), into
perspective.
Background
OpenDoc is one of four technologies to be licensed by the
Component Integration Laboratories (CILabs) as announced on
September 17, 1993. CILab's initial supporters include Apple,(R)
IBM,(R) Novell,(R) Oracle,(R) SunSoft,(R) Taligent,(R)
WordPerfect,(R) and Xerox,(R) with many, many others expected to
join, ensuring the success and acceptance of the CILab
technologies in the marketplace. Together, the four initial
technologies and others adopted by CILabs in the future will
provide a dramatically higher level of interoperability for
applications on all major desktop systems.
CILabs initially plans to license these four key technologies to
the industry:
OpenDoc software architecture for Windows(tm), OS/2,(R)
Macintosh(R) and UNIX(tm) to enable embedding of features from
different applications into a single working document.
Bento(R) for the storage and interchange of multimedia
information.
Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) for the coexistence
of multiple scripting systems.
IBM's System Object Model(tm) (SOM) architecture, a highly
efficient platform and language-independent run-time
mechanism for dynamic object linking.
CILabs plans to make source code available to the industry for
these technologies, and its sponsors plan to support the
technologies across multiple platforms. Initial target platforms
include Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and OS/2, with plans to
support UNIX systems.
For more information on CILabs, OpenDoc, SOM, the Open Scripting
Architecture, and Bento, please contact CILabs at:
Component Integration Laboratories
688 Fourth Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415) 750-8352
(408) 974-9710 FAX
Internet: info@cil.org
OpenDoc vs. OLE
OpenDoc -- along with Bento, Open Scripting Architecture (OSA),
and SOM -- provides a superior and complementary compound
document architecture to OLE 2.0. This document outlines
OpenDoc's strengths over OLE 2.0 in the following areas:
- Object Programming Model
- Development Effort Required
- Scalability and Extensibility
- Scripting and Automation
- Networking Capability
- Activation Model
- Content Shape Support
- Storage Subsystem
- Object Linking
- Openness/Standards Support
- and Certification Process
OpenDoc also is designed to interoperate with all other major
document architectures and object frameworks, including OLE 2.0,
the Taligent document framework, and other emerging environments
such as ScriptX and Fresco. This design lets applications in
other environments interoperate through OpenDoc. Also, OpenDoc
interoperability can help to reduce some of the functional
limitations of applications developed for less sophisticated
environments such as OLE 2.0.
Object Programming Model: OpenDoc uses the Systems Object Model
(SOM) initially released in OS/2 2.0 in April 1992. SOM is a
proven, multi-platform, and language-neutral object model.
It is compliant with the Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA) 1.1 specification endorsed by the Object
Management Group (OMG).
OLE 2.0 is based on Microsoft's Common Object Model (COM) which
is new, proprietary to Microsoft (no source code available) and
is not CORBA-compliant. Microsoft announced it will support
DEC's ObjectBroker which will use CORBA for distribution, but
the object programming model is still COM which is proprietary
to Microsoft and not CORBA-compliant.
One of the greatest benefits of the SOM technology is the single
programming model. SOM scales very gracefully from local to
distributed objects, utilizing the Distributed SOM (DSOM)
framework included in the SOMObjects(tm) Developers Toolkit. With
the SOM/DSOM model the syntax is the same across the entire
spectrum of small and large and local and distributed objects.
Microsoft claims that COM provides a single programming model for
distributed and local objects and that distributed COM behaves
the same as local COM, however, they have not demonstrated this
capability. On closer examination, COM actually proposes two
programming models; class libraries, for small functions, and
the COM/Aggregation model for larger functions. The two models
are very different and require flexibility limiting design
decisions.(1)
Development Effort Required: OpenDoc has been designed to be
easy to adopt. For instance, to write a typical application (or
"part handler" in OpenDoc terminology) that supports:
- Native Object Model Support
- Persistence
- Linking/Embedding
- Container for Parts
- Drag/Drop
- and Edit-in-Place
would require a developer to provide one interface, OpenDoc
XMPPart, and write 50 functions.
OLE 2.0, on the other hand, has complex interfaces that require a
programmer to understand low-level details about the OLE
implementation. For example, to write an application with similar
function in OLE, a developer would have to support the following
interfaces and implement the following number of functions within
each interface using OLE 2.0.(2)
OLE Interfaces Functions
___________________ _________
IOleObject 24
IPersistStorage 10
IDataObject 12
IClassFactory 5
IAdviseSink 8
IOleClientSite 9
IDropTarget 7
IDropSource 5
IPersistFile 9
IOLEItemContainer 8
IOLEInPlaceSite 13
IOLEInPlaceFrame 9
IOLEInPlaceUIWindow 7
___________________ _______________
Interfaces = 13 Functions = 126
Scalability, Extensibility: Scalability and extensibility are
closely related because scaling from a simple compound document
handler to a complex compound document application is easy with
OpenDoc. You can just borrow the function of any set of standard
interfaces, or object classes, simply by inheriting all the
function of that class and modifying it to your particular needs.
By definition you automatically get, or inherit, all of the
existing interfaces and functions, and then can extend those
functions to meet the application's unique requirements.
OLE 2.0 does not support the concept of inheritance. In order
to borrow the functions of a set of interfaces you must claim
you want to aggregate from that interface set, or class, and
then specifically define each and every interface you wish to
include (you don't automatically inherit each interface, you
must explicitly copy each of them). Then you customize and
extend the aggregated model to your particular application's
needs. This model, which Microsoft refers to as aggregation,
is referred to by some application developers as aggravation.
Scripting and Automation: OpenDoc has an Open Scripting
Architecture (OSA) which means that vendors can port their own
scripting languages to OpenDoc and that users have a choice of
multiple scripting languages, which can coexist.
OpenDoc has event suites and a registry for them. Event suites
define standard operations for different types of applications.
For example, there is a set of standard operations for
spreadsheets such as "give me this block of cells" or "perform a
recalc" that will work in a given document regardless of what
OpenDoc-enabled application is performing the spreadsheet
function. Through the commonality of suites as a translator
between applications, any two OpenDoc applications that are
enabled for a suite can communicate. The registry allows the
application to register what application suites it is enabled to
perform.
OLE has no standard suites of events. Using the example above,
if an application that needed data from a particular spreadsheet
would need to know how that particular spreadsheet understood
"give me this block of cells". For a different spreadsheet
the application would communicate "give me this block of cells"
in a different way. The application must specifically support
communications with other applications on an application by
application basis. In addition to creating application to
application communication compatibility issues, the lack of
application suites may pose issues when distributing documents to
other users who may be using different applications or even
different versions of the same application.
OpenDoc also has recordable macros whereas OLE has no recording
Application Programming Interface (API). Recordable macros allow
an application to record a user's actions and then save them to a
script for later use. OpenDoc even allows the recording of
macros across multiple applications and allows the recording to
be stored in the user's preferred scripting language, which is an
extremely powerful feature.
Networking Capability: OpenDoc is designed to provide a fully
cross-platform networked compound document capability. CILabs
supporters intend to network OpenDoc across OS/2, Windows,
Macintosh, and UNIX, all through the use of SOM/CORBA
technologies. CILab plans to provide system vendors and
developers with source code for OpenDoc, Bento, OSA, and SOM to
port to their platform, and system vendors and developers can
implement a variety of CORBA-compliant request brokers to
communicate across the network, including IBM's Distributed
CORBA technology. IBM's implementation of distributed CORBA for
OS/2, AIX,(R) and soon for Windows is Distributed SOM, or DSOM
which is CORBA 1.1-compliant.
COM and OLE source code is not available to the industry without
a license from Microsoft giving Microsoft the ability to chose
which platforms can implement COM and/or OLE. In the
Microsoft/DEC announcement in December 1993, Microsoft
announced intentions to support only COM, not OLE, on several
UNIX platforms, forcing those platforms to a server only status,
because OLE is also required to support OLE compound documents on
the client desktop. CILabs, on the other hand, has announced
their intentions to openly license all four of their key
technologies (OpenDoc, OSA, Bento, SOM) to anyone interested.
Activation Model: In OpenDoc you can directly edit an object,
whereas in OLE you must activate the object before you can edit
it. In OpenDoc, even if you have nested objects (an object
embedded within an object within another object, for example)
you can still directly edit the embedded object. However,
in OLE, you must double click on the highest level object, then
double click on the object within that object, and then double
click on the object you want to edit.
In general, with OLE 2.0, you can activate only one object at a
time meaning you must close any active/editable object in order
to edit another object in that document. OpenDoc allows multiple
active objects and edits.
Content Shape Support: OpenDoc supports irregularly shaped
objects (i.e., wrapping text around a circle or triangle) while
OLE 2.0 supports only rectangular content (i.e., text would
wrap around the smallest rectangle that could surround the circle
or triangle content). In addition, OpenDoc supports overlapped
object content, but OLE 2.0 does not.
Storage Subsystem: OpenDoc is based on the Bento storage
subsystem, which is published, commercially proven, and has been
offered as a standard multimedia container to the Interactive
Multimedia Association. Platform-independent source code for
Bento is currently available from Apple Computer, and CILab plans
to distribute and support the Bento source in the near future.
OLE is proprietary (owned by Microsoft) and is based on DocFiles,
which store the multiple objects within a single file in a DOS
FAT file system tree-like structure that is simplistic when
dealing with complex or distributed objects. Microsoft has
announced its intention to support a distributed object file
system in a follow-on release to Windows NT,(tm) code named
CAIRO, scheduled to ship in 1995.(3)
Object Linking: OpenDoc implements a robust object linking
mechanism with persistent IDs assigned to objects in order to
achieve more reliable linking for both local and remote objects.
OLE 2.0 has proven to have fragile links that can break when
moving objects, even within the same document. For instance,
OLE references an object via a moniker, which, typically, is a
filename (pathname) concatenated with a series of item name
parts.(4) If the file is deleted, renamed or moved, then the
link breaks.
Openness/Standards Support: Source code will be available to
members via CILab for OpenDoc, OSA, Bento, and SOM. These
technologies are designed to be portable and will be supported on
multiple platforms. CILab is planning to license these
technologies on a completely non-discriminatory basis. In
addition, the underlying object model is based on SOM, which is
CORBA-compliant.
Source code is not available for OLE, and Microsoft has the
final say on all interface and implementation decisions making
it proprietary. Microsoft has tried to appear softer on their
proprietary stance by putting COM on top of DEC's ObjectBroker
which uses CORBA to communicate. However, putting a proprietary
interface (COM) on both ends of an open standard (CORBA) makes
it a proprietary programming interface.
Certification Process: CILabs has announced they will have a
formal certification process so that customers purchasing products
from multiple vendors who support OpenDoc can have a high degree
of confidence those applications or part handlers will work
together. Customers or individual users using multiple OLE
applications together will have to rely on each vendor's independent
testing so customers will have to do their own integration testing.
In summary, it is clear that OpenDoc is superior and complementary
in many ways to OLE as a compound document architecture. OpenDoc
has significant advantages for users, developers, system integrators
and MIS personnel, alike.
With the initial backing of Apple, IBM, Novell, Oracle, SunSoft,
Taligent, WordPerfect, and Xerox, and with many, many others
expected to follow, CILab technologies have gained the acceptance
and critical mass of the ISV community. The ISVs will produce
compelling applications based on CILab technologies to ensure
acceptance by the industry as a whole.
In addition, OpenDoc will complement OLE through an interoperability
solution that is currently being developed by the WordPerfect
Corporation. And, as stated earlier, OpenDoc will interoperate
with the robust, fully object-oriented Taligent frameworks that
are being ported to OS/2, AIX, Workplace OS, and other key industry
platforms.
___________________________________________________________________
Notes:
1 Source: IBM analysis of Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding
(OLE) Today and Tomorrow - November 1993
2 Source: Internal preliminary analysis and design using Microsoft
Object Linking and Embedding - Programmer's Reference Guide
(pre-release)
3 PCWeek, December 6, 1993, page 1
4 Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding - Programmer's Reference
Guide, Creating Applications (pre-release), page 101,
"Typically, an object's moniker will be a filename (pathname)
concatenated with a series of item name parts."
___________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer:
Some of the information in this paper concerns future products,
or future releases of current, commercially available products.
Discussion of Windows and OLE are based on information in the
public trade press, and is subject to change. IBM's and other
vendors' future products and their performance, functions and
availability are based upon IBM's or those vendors' current
intent, and are subject to change.
Special Notices regarding IBM or other vendors' mentioned in
this document:
References in this document to IBM's or other vendors' current
and future products, programs, or services do not imply that
IBM or those vendors' intends to make these generally available
in all countries in which they operate.
IBM or other vendors may have patents or pending patent
applications covering subject matter in this document. This
document does not grant anyone a license to those patents, patent
applications, or to any other IBM or other vendors' intellectual
property.
Trademarks:
Apple, Bento and Macintosh are registered trademarks and OpenDoc
is a trademark of Apple Corporation
IBM and OS/2 are registered trademarks and SOMObjects and SOM
are trademarks of IBM Corporation
Novell is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc.
UNIX is a trademark of X/Open Company Ltd.
Object Management Group and OMG are registered trademarks of
Object Management Group, Inc.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation
Taligent is a registered trademark of Taligent, Inc.
WordPerfect is a registered trademark of WordPerfect Corporation
Xerox is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation
Microsoft is a registered trademark and Windows and Windows
NT are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation
________________________________________________________________
IBM Personal Software Products, 11400 Burnett Road, Austin TX
78758 USA
________________________________________________________________
OpenDoc vs. OLE 2.0
Superior by Design
A Developer's View
January, 1994
Compound Document Architectures - OpenDoc and OLE 2.0
Compound document architectures are an important new type of
software platform. IBM is providing the analysis in this white
paper to help put the major compound document architectures:
OpenDoc(tm) and Object Linking and Embedding 2.0 (OLE 2.0), into
perspective.
Background
OpenDoc is one of four technologies to be licensed by the
Component Integration Laboratories (CILabs) as announced on
September 17, 1993. CILab's initial supporters include Apple,(R)
IBM,(R) Novell,(R) Oracle,(R) SunSoft,(R) Taligent,(R)
WordPerfect,(R) and Xerox,(R) with many, many others expected to
join, ensuring the success and acceptance of the CILab
technologies in the marketplace. Together, the four initial
technologies and others adopted by CILabs in the future will
provide a dramatically higher level of interoperability for
applications on all major desktop systems.
CILabs initially plans to license these four key technologies to
the industry:
OpenDoc software architecture for Windows(tm), OS/2,(R)
Macintosh(R) and UNIX(tm) to enable embedding of features from
different applications into a single working document.
Bento(R) for the storage and interchange of multimedia
information.
Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) for the coexistence
of multiple scripting systems.
IBM's System Object Model(tm) (SOM) architecture, a highly
efficient platform and language-independent run-time
mechanism for dynamic object linking.
CILabs plans to make source code available to the industry for
these technologies, and its sponsors plan to support the
technologies across multiple platforms. Initial target platforms
include Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and OS/2, with plans to
support UNIX systems.
For more information on CILabs, OpenDoc, SOM, the Open Scripting
Architecture, and Bento, please contact CILabs at:
Component Integration Laboratories
688 Fourth Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415) 750-8352
(408) 974-9710 FAX
Internet: info@cil.org
OpenDoc vs. OLE
OpenDoc -- along with Bento, Open Scripting Architecture (OSA),
and SOM -- provides a superior and complementary compound
document architecture to OLE 2.0. This document outlines
OpenDoc's strengths over OLE 2.0 in the following areas:
- Object Programming Model
- Development Effort Required
- Scalability and Extensibility
- Scripting and Automation
- Networking Capability
- Activation Model
- Content Shape Support
- Storage Subsystem
- Object Linking
- Openness/Standards Support
- and Certification Process
OpenDoc also is designed to interoperate with all other major
document architectures and object frameworks, including OLE 2.0,
the Taligent document framework, and other emerging environments
such as ScriptX and Fresco. This design lets applications in
other environments interoperate through OpenDoc. Also, OpenDoc
interoperability can help to reduce some of the functional
limitations of applications developed for less sophisticated
environments such as OLE 2.0.
Object Programming Model: OpenDoc uses the Systems Object Model
(SOM) initially released in OS/2 2.0 in April 1992. SOM is a
proven, multi-platform, and language-neutral object model.
It is compliant with the Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA) 1.1 specification endorsed by the Object
Management Group (OMG).
OLE 2.0 is based on Microsoft's Common Object Model (COM) which
is new, proprietary to Microsoft (no source code available) and
is not CORBA-compliant. Microsoft announced it will support
DEC's ObjectBroker which will use CORBA for distribution, but
the object programming model is still COM which is proprietary
to Microsoft and not CORBA-compliant.
One of the greatest benefits of the SOM technology is the single
programming model. SOM scales very gracefully from local to
distributed objects, utilizing the Distributed SOM (DSOM)
framework included in the SOMObjects(tm) Developers Toolkit. With
the SOM/DSOM model the syntax is the same across the entire
spectrum of small and large and local and distributed objects.
Microsoft claims that COM provides a single programming model for
distributed and local objects and that distributed COM behaves
the same as local COM, however, they have not demonstrated this
capability. On closer examination, COM actually proposes two
programming models; class libraries, for small functions, and
the COM/Aggregation model for larger functions. The two models
are very different and require flexibility limiting design
decisions.(1)
Development Effort Required: OpenDoc has been designed to be
easy to adopt. For instance, to write a typical application (or
"part handler" in OpenDoc terminology) that supports:
- Native Object Model Support
- Persistence
- Linking/Embedding
- Container for Parts
- Drag/Drop
- and Edit-in-Place
would require a developer to provide one interface, OpenDoc
XMPPart, and write 50 functions.
OLE 2.0, on the other hand, has complex interfaces that require a
programmer to understand low-level details about the OLE
implementation. For example, to write an application with similar
function in OLE, a developer would have to support the following
interfaces and implement the following number of functions within
each interface using OLE 2.0.(2)
OLE Interfaces Functions
___________________ _________
IOleObject 24
IPersistStorage 10
IDataObject 12
IClassFactory 5
IAdviseSink 8
IOleClientSite 9
IDropTarget 7
IDropSource 5
IPersistFile 9
IOLEItemContainer 8
IOLEInPlaceSite 13
IOLEInPlaceFrame 9
IOLEInPlaceUIWindow 7
___________________ _______________
Interfaces = 13 Functions = 126
Scalability, Extensibility: Scalability and extensibility are
closely related because scaling from a simple compound document
handler to a complex compound document application is easy with
OpenDoc. You can just borrow the function of any set of standard
interfaces, or object classes, simply by inheriting all the
function of that class and modifying it to your particular needs.
By definition you automatically get, or inherit, all of the
existing interfaces and functions, and then can extend those
functions to meet the application's unique requirements.
OLE 2.0 does not support the concept of inheritance. In order
to borrow the functions of a set of interfaces you must claim
you want to aggregate from that interface set, or class, and
then specifically define each and every interface you wish to
include (you don't automatically inherit each interface, you
must explicitly copy each of them). Then you customize and
extend the aggregated model to your particular application's
needs. This model, which Microsoft refers to as aggregation,
is referred to by some application developers as aggravation.
Scripting and Automation: OpenDoc has an Open Scripting
Architecture (OSA) which means that vendors can port their own
scripting languages to OpenDoc and that users have a choice of
multiple scripting languages, which can coexist.
OpenDoc has event suites and a registry for them. Event suites
define standard operations for different types of applications.
For example, there is a set of standard operations for
spreadsheets such as "give me this block of cells" or "perform a
recalc" that will work in a given document regardless of what
OpenDoc-enabled application is performing the spreadsheet
function. Through the commonality of suites as a translator
between applications, any two OpenDoc applications that are
enabled for a suite can communicate. The registry allows the
application to register what application suites it is enabled to
perform.
OLE has no standard suites of events. Using the example above,
if an application that needed data from a particular spreadsheet
would need to know how that particular spreadsheet understood
"give me this block of cells". For a different spreadsheet
the application would communicate "give me this block of cells"
in a different way. The application must specifically support
communications with other applications on an application by
application basis. In addition to creating application to
application communication compatibility issues, the lack of
application suites may pose issues when distributing documents to
other users who may be using different applications or even
different versions of the same application.
OpenDoc also has recordable macros whereas OLE has no recording
Application Programming Interface (API). Recordable macros allow
an application to record a user's actions and then save them to a
script for later use. OpenDoc even allows the recording of
macros across multiple applications and allows the recording to
be stored in the user's preferred scripting language, which is an
extremely powerful feature.
Networking Capability: OpenDoc is designed to provide a fully
cross-platform networked compound document capability. CILabs
supporters intend to network OpenDoc across OS/2, Windows,
Macintosh, and UNIX, all through the use of SOM/CORBA
technologies. CILab plans to provide system vendors and
developers with source code for OpenDoc, Bento, OSA, and SOM to
port to their platform, and system vendors and developers can
implement a variety of CORBA-compliant request brokers to
communicate across the network, including IBM's Distributed
CORBA technology. IBM's implementation of distributed CORBA for
OS/2, AIX,(R) and soon for Windows is Distributed SOM, or DSOM
which is CORBA 1.1-compliant.
COM and OLE source code is not available to the industry without
a license from Microsoft giving Microsoft the ability to chose
which platforms can implement COM and/or OLE. In the
Microsoft/DEC announcement in December 1993, Microsoft
announced intentions to support only COM, not OLE, on several
UNIX platforms, forcing those platforms to a server only status,
because OLE is also required to support OLE compound documents on
the client desktop. CILabs, on the other hand, has announced
their intentions to openly license all four of their key
technologies (OpenDoc, OSA, Bento, SOM) to anyone interested.
Activation Model: In OpenDoc you can directly edit an object,
whereas in OLE you must activate the object before you can edit
it. In OpenDoc, even if you have nested objects (an object
embedded within an object within another object, for example)
you can still directly edit the embedded object. However,
in OLE, you must double click on the highest level object, then
double click on the object within that object, and then double
click on the object you want to edit.
In general, with OLE 2.0, you can activate only one object at a
time meaning you must close any active/editable object in order
to edit another object in that document. OpenDoc allows multiple
active objects and edits.
Content Shape Support: OpenDoc supports irregularly shaped
objects (i.e., wrapping text around a circle or triangle) while
OLE 2.0 supports only rectangular content (i.e., text would
wrap around the smallest rectangle that could surround the circle
or triangle content). In addition, OpenDoc supports overlapped
object content, but OLE 2.0 does not.
Storage Subsystem: OpenDoc is based on the Bento storage
subsystem, which is published, commercially proven, and has been
offered as a standard multimedia container to the Interactive
Multimedia Association. Platform-independent source code for
Bento is currently available from Apple Computer, and CILab plans
to distribute and support the Bento source in the near future.
OLE is proprietary (owned by Microsoft) and is based on DocFiles,
which store the multiple objects within a single file in a DOS
FAT file system tree-like structure that is simplistic when
dealing with complex or distributed objects. Microsoft has
announced its intention to support a distributed object file
system in a follow-on release to Windows NT,(tm) code named
CAIRO, scheduled to ship in 1995.(3)
Object Linking: OpenDoc implements a robust object linking
mechanism with persistent IDs assigned to objects in order to
achieve more reliable linking for both local and remote objects.
OLE 2.0 has proven to have fragile links that can break when
moving objects, even within the same document. For instance,
OLE references an object via a moniker, which, typically, is a
filename (pathname) concatenated with a series of item name
parts.(4) If the file is deleted, renamed or moved, then the
link breaks.
Openness/Standards Support: Source code will be available to
members via CILab for OpenDoc, OSA, Bento, and SOM. These
technologies are designed to be portable and will be supported on
multiple platforms. CILab is planning to license these
technologies on a completely non-discriminatory basis. In
addition, the underlying object model is based on SOM, which is
CORBA-compliant.
Source code is not available for OLE, and Microsoft has the
final say on all interface and implementation decisions making
it proprietary. Microsoft has tried to appear softer on their
proprietary stance by putting COM on top of DEC's ObjectBroker
which uses CORBA to communicate. However, putting a proprietary
interface (COM) on both ends of an open standard (CORBA) makes
it a proprietary programming interface.
Certification Process: CILabs has announced they will have a
formal certification process so that customers purchasing products
from multiple vendors who support OpenDoc can have a high degree
of confidence those applications or part handlers will work
together. Customers or individual users using multiple OLE
applications together will have to rely on each vendor's independent
testing so customers will have to do their own integration testing.
In summary, it is clear that OpenDoc is superior and complementary
in many ways to OLE as a compound document architecture. OpenDoc
has significant advantages for users, developers, system integrators
and MIS personnel, alike.
With the initial backing of Apple, IBM, Novell, Oracle, SunSoft,
Taligent, WordPerfect, and Xerox, and with many, many others
expected to follow, CILab technologies have gained the acceptance
and critical mass of the ISV community. The ISVs will produce
compelling applications based on CILab technologies to ensure
acceptance by the industry as a whole.
In addition, OpenDoc will complement OLE through an interoperability
solution that is currently being developed by the WordPerfect
Corporation. And, as stated earlier, OpenDoc will interoperate
with the robust, fully object-oriented Taligent frameworks that
are being ported to OS/2, AIX, Workplace OS, and other key industry
platforms.
___________________________________________________________________
Notes:
1 Source: IBM analysis of Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding
(OLE) Today and Tomorrow - November 1993
2 Source: Internal preliminary analysis and design using Microsoft
Object Linking and Embedding - Programmer's Reference Guide
(pre-release)
3 PCWeek, December 6, 1993, page 1
4 Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding - Programmer's Reference
Guide, Creating Applications (pre-release), page 101,
"Typically, an object's moniker will be a filename (pathname)
concatenated with a series of item name parts."
___________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer:
Some of the information in this paper concerns future products,
or future releases of current, commercially available products.
Discussion of Windows and OLE are based on information in the
public trade press, and is subject to change. IBM's and other
vendors' future products and their performance, functions and
availability are based upon IBM's or those vendors' current
intent, and are subject to change.
Special Notices regarding IBM or other vendors' mentioned in
this document:
References in this document to IBM's or other vendors' current
and future products, programs, or services do not imply that
IBM or those vendors' intends to make these generally available
in all countries in which they operate.
IBM or other vendors may have patents or pending patent
applications covering subject matter in this document. This
document does not grant anyone a license to those patents, patent
applications, or to any other IBM or other vendors' intellectual
property.
Trademarks:
Apple, Bento and Macintosh are registered trademarks and OpenDoc
is a trademark of Apple Corporation
IBM and OS/2 are registered trademarks and SOMObjects and SOM
are trademarks of IBM Corporation
Novell is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc.
UNIX is a trademark of X/Open Company Ltd.
Object Management Group and OMG are registered trademarks of
Object Management Group, Inc.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation
Taligent is a registered trademark of Taligent, Inc.
WordPerfect is a registered trademark of WordPerfect Corporation
Xerox is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation
Microsoft is a registered trademark and Windows and Windows
NT are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation
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IBM Personal Software Products, 11400 Burnett Road, Austin TX
78758 USA
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