OpenStep - Building On OpenStep

Building On OpenStep

The standardization on OpenStep also allowed for the creation of several new library packages that were delivered on the OPENSTEP platform. Unlike the operating system as a whole, these packages were designed to run stand-alone on practically any operating system. The idea was to use OpenStep code as a basis for network-wide applications running across different platforms, as opposed to using CORBA or some other system.

Primary among these packages was Portable Distributed Objects (PDO). PDO was essentially an even more "stripped down" version of OpenStep containing only the Foundation Kit technologies, combined with new libraries to provide remote invocation with very little code. Unlike OpenStep, which defined an operating system that applications would run in, under PDO the libraries were compiled into the application itself, creating a stand-alone "native" application for a particular platform. PDO was small enough to be easily portable, and versions were released for all major server vendors.

PDO became somewhat infamous in the mid-1990s when NeXT staff took to writing in solutions to various CORBA magazine articles in a few lines of code, whereas the original article would fill several pages. Even though using PDO required the installation of a considerable amount of supporting code (Objective-C and the libraries), PDO applications were nevertheless considerably smaller than similar CORBA solutions, typically about one-half to one-third the size.

The similar D'OLE provided the same types of services, but presented the resulting objects as DCOM objects, with the goal of allowing programmers to create DCOM services running on high-powered platforms, called from Microsoft Windows applications. For instance one could develop a high-powered financial modeling application using D'OLE, and then call it directly from within Microsoft Excel. When D'OLE was first released, OLE by itself only communicated between applications running on a single machine. PDO enabled NeXT to demonstrate Excel talking to other Microsoft applications across a network before Microsoft themselves were able to implement this functionality.

Another package developed on OpenStep was Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF), a tremendously powerful (for the time) object-relational mapping product. EOF became very popular in the enterprise market, notably in the financial sector where OPENSTEP caused something of a minor revolution.