San Francisco Ð NeXT may have been the 261st company to join the Object Management Group (OMG), but it intends to be at the front of the line when it comes to proposing object standards.
In ending its holdout from the industry consortium, NeXT announced that NeXTSTEP 3.0 would be "OMG conformant," making it the first computer company to ship a suite of objects that conform to OMG specifications. NeXT also said it would be an active participant in shaping OMG's future direction.
"By joining OMG, NeXT has become a citizen of the world of computing," said Nina Lytton, editor of Open Systems Advisor. "This shows that NeXT understands real customer requirements."
The OMG aims to establish a common framework for application development across all major hardware platforms and operating systems. To date, OMG has settled on one technical standard, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA, a specification for messaging between objects over networks.
Other major OMG participants include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Digital Equipment Corporation.
According to OMG President Christopher Stone, the "OMG-conformant" status means that NeXTSTEP and third-party NeXTSTEP objects are compatible with the CORBA specification. "We welcome NeXT's full participation in our work to establish widely used standards for object technology," Stone said.
NeXT CEO Steve Jobs said the company had delayed joining OMG because "we were less than delighted with the elegance of some of OMG's early work. But its latest work on distributed-object technology is better."