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Technology Stocks : OBJECT DESIGN Inc.: Bargain of the year!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Trocchi who wrote (2252)	9/3/1998 9:29:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 3194

Object Design goes mainstream... in the press: Financial Times - Thursday September 3 1998 [p.20] Elusive object comes into view Object databases are poised to enter the mainstream of computing, writes Geoff Nairn When the Asian currency crisis produced record trading volumes on the Chicago Stock Exchange last October, traders were living on their nerves. But at least their trading system coped easily. That was due partly to the installation of a system that includes an ''object database''. Several small vendors have fought for years to establish these databases in a market dominated by the heavyweight ''relational'' database suppliers, such as Oracle, International Business Machines and Microsoft. Object-oriented technology allows large, complex programs to be assembled from manageable chunks of code called ''objects'', whose inbuilt behavior efficiently and accurately models that of the real-world objects they represent. Formerly of mainly academic interest, objects are poised to enter the mainstream of corporate computing. A growing number of organisations are finding the technology better suited to the challenges of building complex modern information systems than established computing technologies. ''Object technology is a natural fit for the financial community,'' says John Kerin, vice-president of application development at the exchange. When a Chicago trader enters an order on one of the 110 workstations connected to the exchange's system, an ''order'' object is created and automatically routed to an electronic order book, where it is matched against other orders. To store and process these real-time order objects, the exchange uses an object database from US-based Versant. Object databases are relatively rare and many organisations developing object-based software prefer to use the more familiar relational database technology to store their object data. But that requires objects to be ''mapped'' on to the simpler data structures --tables and rows-- of a relational database. Mr Kerin believes this is a poor solution. He says a ''pure'' object database such as the Versant product gives better performance for real-time trading than adapting a relational database. That is because the object database temporarily stores or ''caches'' the objects representing the trading orders in the memory of each client workstation for faster access. Relational databases lack this ''client-side cache'' capability. The relational database has long been king of the database market, which in 1997 was worth $6.6 billion worldwide, says Dataquest, the research firm. The object database industry accounted for only $150 million of the total. But growth is faltering and analysts partly blame the relational vendors' slowness to embrace new trends, such as object-based computing and the internet. A relational database has a rigid two-dimensional view of the world and the internet's rich mix of data --documents, images, audio and video clips-- cannot be stored directly in its tables and rows. Vendors have thus had to develop ''extensions'' to enable their relational databases to handle multimedia better. In spite of object databases' advantages, Patrick O'Brian, director of product development with Object Design, a rival to Versant, admits it was ''wishful thinking'' to believe that object databases would one day replace relational technology. Analysts agree. ''For certain types of applications, such as network management, financial applications or decision support, object databases are the clear winner,'' says David Wells, senior analyst at Ovum, the UK consultancy. ''But I do not think they will go beyond these applications.'' Nevertheless, the object database vendors believe they can and hope the internet will create opportunities. Mr O'Brian cites as an example SouthWest Airlines, which uses Object Design's ObjectStore product to offer an internet booking service. ObjectStore acts as a ''front end'' to the US airline's reservation system based on a relational database. ''A lot of the time we get involved in a project when the relational model has failed,'' he says. The object database industry got a big boost in December 1997 when Computer Associates launched its Jasmine object database, becoming the first big software company to back the technology. CA also sells a relational database, Ingres, but says the two products apply to different markets. ''We are not saying 'move everything over to Jasmine' as a lot of applications still just deal with text and numbers,'' says Ray McGinley, a UK-based consultant for CA. The Aberdeen Group, a US consultancy, says Jasmine is better than relational databases et handling internet applications with complex data content and interaction. CA says more than 50 customers are already building applications with Jasmine and its arrival has given the object database industry new respectability. It has also forced the relational database vendors to take objects seriously by producing a new generation of hybrid ''object-relational'' databases --also known as ''universal'' databases-- that aims to deliver the best of both worlds. For example, IBM's DB2 Universal Database has been designed to support the popular Java object programming language, while Oracle's latest Oracle8 database has an ''object option''. Critics claim these products are compromised technologically and cannot live up to the ''universal'' claim. They note that CA wasted 18 months trying to add object extensions to its Ingres relational database before building a pure object product --Jasmine. ''We just kept hitting a brick wall each time we tried to extend Ingres to deal with objects,'' says Mr McGinley. According to IDC, the US consultancy, putting object extensions on a relational database is like adding global navigation systems to horse-drawn carriages. ''You will have interesting enhancements but the wrong base vehicle. In the end, it will not be the appropriate vehicle for the information superhighway.'' *********************************************** Let's hope yesterday's rally goes on today! Gustave.

To: Bob Trocchi who wrote (2252)	9/3/1998 4:40:00 PM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3194

Paradigm Plus is an OO design, documentation and code generating tool. The leader in its market is Rose from Rational. Most of these support the UML (Unified Modeling Language) developed by Booch, Rumbaugh, and others. As you can see, this is quite a different market from ODIS. Just because something can be integrated to Visual Studio, there is not necessarily a market competition to ODIS. Many tools can be integrated to Visual Studio and applied to coding within the development environment.