OpenDoc

Last updated

OpenDoc
Developer(s) Apple Inc.
Stable release
1.2.1 / March 1997;26 years ago (March 1997)
Operating system Classic Mac OS, OS/2, Windows, AIX
Type Compound document framework

OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). [1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the AIM alliance was launched by Apple, IBM, and Motorola, with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997.

Contents

Overview

The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components which are responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc is a framework in which these components can run together, and a compound document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents can then be opened on different networked machines of different operating systems, on which the OpenDoc frameworks can substitute suitable components for each part, even if they are from different vendors. [2] In this way users can "build up" their documents from parts. Since there is no main application and the only visible interface is the document itself, the system is known as document-centered. [3]

OpenDoc was conceived to allow, for example, smaller, third-party developers to enter the competitive office suite software market, and build small, specialized applications instead of having to provide a complete suite. It was envisioned to facilitate a new future of online app stores. [4]

History

Background

Microsoft approached Apple asking for input on a proposed OLE II project. Apple had been experimenting internally with software components for some time, based on the initial work done on its Publish and Subscribe linking model and the AppleScript scripting language, which in turn was based on the HyperCard programming environment. Apple reviewed the Microsoft prototype and document, and returned a list of problems with the design. Microsoft and Apple were very competitive, were unable to agree on common goals, and did not work together.

At about the same time, a group of third-party developers had met at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC '91) and tried to establish a standardized document format, based conceptually on the Interchange File Format (IFF) from Electronic Arts. Apple became interested in this work, and soon dedicated some engineers to building and documenting such a system. Initial work was published on the WWDC CDs, and several follow-up versions on later developer CDs. A component document system would only work with a known document format that all the components could use, and so soon the standardized document format was pulled into the component software effort. The format quickly changed from a simple one using tags to a very complex object oriented persistence layer called Bento.

Initially the effort was codenamed "Exemplar", then "Jedi", "Amber", and eventually "OpenDoc".

Competing visions

In March 1992, the AIM alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola, was launched with OpenDoc as a foundation. Taligent was formed as a primary objective of AIM, adopted OpenDoc, and promised somewhat similar functionality although based on very different underlying mechanisms. OpenDoc progressed, but Apple greatly confused developers by suggesting that it should be used only for porting existing software, but new projects should instead be based on Taligent as the presumptive future OS for Macintosh. In 1993, John Sculley called Project Amber (a codename for what would become OpenDoc) a path toward Taligent. [5] [6] Taligent was considered the future of the Macintosh, and work on other tools like MacApp was considerably deprioritized.

Through OpenDoc's entire lifespan, analysts and users each reportedly "had very different views" of the OpenDoc initiative. They were confused about their role, regarding how much of OpenDoc-based development would be their responsibility versus IBM's and Apple's responsibility. There were never many released OpenDoc components compared to Microsoft's ActiveX components. Therefore, reception was very mixed. [7]

Starting in 1992, Apple attempted to replace MacApp development framework with a cross-platform solution called Bedrock, from Symantec. Symantec's Think C was rapidly becoming the tool of choice for development on the Mac. While collaborating to port Symantec's tools to the PowerPC, Apple learned of Symantec's internal porting tools. Apple proposed merging existing MacApp concepts and code with Symantec's to produce an advanced cross-platform system. Bedrock began to compete with OpenDoc as the solution for future development.

As OpenDoc gained currency within Apple, the company started to push Symantec into including OpenDoc functionality in Bedrock. Symantec was uninterested in this, and eventually gave up on the effort, passing the code to Apple. Bedrock was in a very early state of development at this point, even after 18 months of work, as the development team at Symantec suffered continual turnover. Apple proposed that the code would be used for OpenDoc programming, but nothing was ever heard of this again, and Bedrock disappeared.

As a result of Taligent and Bedrock both being Apple's officially promised future platforms, little effort had been expended on updating MacApp. Because Bedrock was discontinued in 1993 and Taligent was discontinued in 1996 without any MacOS release, this left Apple with only OpenDoc as a modern OO-based programming system.

Partnerships and adoption

The development team realized in mid-1992 that an industry coalition was needed to promote the system, and created the Component Integration Laboratories (CI Labs) with IBM and WordPerfect.[ citation needed ] IBM introduced to OpenDoc, its already mature System Object Model (SOM) and Distributed SOM (DSOM) shared library systems from AIX and OS/2. DSOM allows live networked linking of data between different platforms, which OLE and COM did not have. [8] SOM became a major part of Apple's future efforts, in and out of OpenDoc.

In March 1995, many OpenDoc announcements came. CI Labs ownership included Apple, IBM, Novell, and SunSoft. IBM pre-announced at Object World Boston the future release of the OpenDoc OS/2 Developer Toolkit version 2, containing the complete API, and then the final release of OpenDoc 1.0 for OS/2 3.0. Taligent's CommonPoint application framework has compound document features based on OpenDoc. Novell announced at the Brainshare conference, a plan to break up most or all of its products into OpenDoc components, beginning with WordPerfect applications and then its NetWare operating system. NetWare was intended to become a managed Compound Document Service for networks, to manage object links and compound document searching. Novell announced a plan for OpenDoc to become the basis for building UnixWare applications. It acknowledged that its operating systems lack a component architecture, and that Microsoft would never license the source code for OLE or COM, so Novell needs to support those also via OpenDoc. More than 20 more companies announced their products' support for OpenDoc, citing its technological superiority to Microsoft's OLE and COM, and its wide cross-platform support. [8]

In 1996, OpenDoc was adopted by the Object Management Group, in part due to SOM's use of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), maintained by the OMG.

CI Labs never publicly released the source code, but licensed it to developers for feedback, testing, and debugging.

Release

In September 1994, the OpenDoc subsystem was launched on System 7.5, [9] and later on OS/2 Warp 4.

Products

After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996. [7]

The WAV word processor is a semi-successful OpenDoc word processor from Digital Harbor LLC. The Numbers & Charts package is a spreadsheet and 3D real-time charting solution from Adrenaline Software. Lexi from Soft-Linc, Inc. is a linguistic package containing a spell checker, thesaurus, and a simple translation tool which WAV and other components use. The Nisus Writer software by Nisus incorporated OpenDoc, but its implementation was hopelessly buggy. Bare Bones Software tested the market by making its BBEdit Lite freeware text editor available as an OpenDoc editor component. RagTime, a completely integrated office package with spreadsheet, publishing, and image editing was ported to OpenDoc shortly before OpenDoc was cancelled. Apple's 1996 release of ClarisWorks 5.0 (the predecessor of AppleWorks) was planned to support OpenDoc components, but this was dropped.

Educational

Another OpenDoc container application, called Dock'Em, was written by MetaMind Software under a grant from the National Science Foundation and commissioned by The Center for Research in Math and Science Education, headquartered at San Diego State University. The goal was to allow multimedia content to be included in documents describing curriculum.

Several physics simulations were written by MetaMind Software and by Russian software firm Physicon (OpenTeach) as OpenDoc parts. [10] Physics curricula for high school and middle school focused on them. With the discontinuation of OpenDoc, the simulations were rewritten as Java applets and published from the Center as The Constructing Physics Understanding (CPU) Project by Dr. Fred Goldberg. [11]

Components of the E-Slate educational microworlds platform were originally implemented as OpenDoc parts in C++ on both MacOS and Windows, reimplemented later (after the discontinuation of OpenDoc) as Java applets and eventually as JavaBeans.

Cancellation

OpenDoc had several hundred developers signed up. Apple was rapidly losing money at the time and many in the industry expected the company to fail.

In March 1997, OpenDoc was discontinued with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, who had been at NeXT during its development. He said Apple's management "put a bullet through [OpenDoc's] head", and most of the Apple Advanced Technology Group was laid off in a big reduction in force. [12] [13] Other sources noted that Microsoft hired away three ClarisWorks developers who were responsible for OpenDoc integration into ClarisWorks. [14]

Since Mac OS 8.5, OpenDoc was no longer bundled. [15] AppleShare IP Manager from versions 5.0 to 6.2 relied on OpenDoc, but AppleShare IP 6.3 eliminated this, as the first Mac OS 9 compatible version, released in 1999. [16] Apple officially relinquished the last trademark on the name "OpenDoc" on June 11, 2005.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStep</span> Defunct object-oriented application programming interface specification

OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification that was developed by NeXT Computer. It provides a framework for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and developing software applications. OpenStep was designed to be platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that could run on multiple operating systems, including NeXTSTEP, Windows NT, and various Unix-based systems. It has influenced the development of other GUI frameworks, such as Cocoa for macOS and GNUstep.

A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is an environment in which software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed using the services provided by the platform. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taligent</span> Software company (1992–1998)

Taligent was an American software company. Based on the Pink object-oriented operating system conceived by Apple in 1988, Taligent Inc. was incorporated as an Apple/IBM partnership in 1992, and was dissolved into IBM in 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AIM alliance</span> Historic business alliance

The AIM alliance, also known as the PowerPC alliance, was formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Its goal was to create an industry-wide open-standard computing platform based on the POWER instruction set architecture. It was intended to solve legacy problems, future-proof the industry, and compete with Microsoft's monopoly and the Wintel duopoly. The alliance yielded the launch of Taligent, Kaleida Labs, the PowerPC CPU family, the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) hardware platform standard, and Apple's Power Macintosh computer line.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyberdog</span> Suite of computer applications for Internet use

Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based Internet suite of applications, developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997. It worked with later versions of System 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems.

An object-oriented operating system is an operating system that is designed, structured, and operated using object-oriented programming principles.

FileMaker is a cross-platform relational database application developed by Claris International, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. It integrates a database engine with a graphical user interface (GUI) and security features, allowing users to visually modify a database. Versions for desktops, servers, iOS and web-delivery have been released.

Claris International Inc., formerly FileMaker Inc., is a computer software development company formed as a subsidiary company of Apple Computer in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint, in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and operating systems activities.

Star Trek is the code name that was given to a secret prototype project, running a port of Macintosh System 7 and its applications on Intel-compatible x86 personal computers. The project, starting in February 1992, was conceived in collaboration between Apple Computer, who provided the majority of engineers, and Novell, who at the time was one of the leaders of cross-platform file-servers. The plan was that Novell would market the resulting OS as a challenge to Microsoft Windows, but the project was discontinued in 1993 and never released, although components were reused in other projects. The project was named after the Star Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before".

VisualAge is a family of computer integrated development environments from IBM, which supports multiple programming languages. VisualAge was first released in October 1993 and was discontinued April 30, 2007 and its web page removed in September 2011. VisualAge was also marketed as VisualAge Smalltalk, and in 2005, Instantiations, Inc. acquired the worldwide rights to this product. IBM has stated that XL C/C++ is the followup product to VisualAge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workplace OS</span> Defunct 1990s operating system

Workplace OS is IBM's ultimate operating system prototype of the 1990s. It is the product of an exploratory research program in 1991 which yielded a design called the Grand Unifying Theory of Systems (GUTS), proposing to unify the world's systems as generalized personalities cohabitating concurrently upon a universally sophisticated platform of object-oriented frameworks upon one microkernel. Developed in collaboration with Taligent and its Pink operating system imported from Apple via the AIM alliance, the ambitious Workplace OS was intended to improve software portability and maintenance costs by aggressively recruiting all operating system vendors to convert their products into Workplace OS personalities. In 1995, IBM reported that "Nearly 20 corporations, universities, and research institutes worldwide have licensed the microkernel, laying the foundation for a completely open microkernel standard." At the core of IBM's new unified strategic direction for the entire company, the project was intended also as a bellwether toward PowerPC hardware platforms, to compete with the Wintel duopoly.

Bedrock was a joint effort by Apple Computer and Symantec to produce a cross platform programming framework for writing applications on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. The project was a failure for a variety of reasons, and after delivering a developer preview version the project was abandoned in late 1993.

Publish and Subscribe was a document linking model introduced by Apple Computer in System 7. Named the Edition Manager in developer documentation, it extended the existing cut and paste editing model with a notification system; "subscribers" could include parts of "published" documents within themselves, and changes to the original published document would be noticed and updated by the subscribers. To the user the system was very similar to cut and paste in concept; material would be selected from the source document and published, creating an edition file, then placed into the subscriber by selecting that clipping file and positioning it inside the document.

MacApp is the object oriented application framework for Apple Computer's discontinued classic Mac OS. Released in 1985, it transitioned from Object Pascal to C++ in 1991's version 3.0 release, which offered support for much of System 7's new functionality. MacApp was used for a variety of major applications, including Adobe Photoshop and SoftPress Freeway. Microsoft's MFC and Borland's OWL were both based directly on MacApp concepts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Architecture of macOS</span> Layers of the operating system

The architecture of macOS describes the layers of the operating system that is the culmination of Apple Inc.'s decade-long research and development process to replace the classic Mac OS.

Two major families of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xamarin</span> American software company

Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS, which are cross-platform implementations of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Specifications.

An Internet operating system, or Internet OS, is any type of operating system designed to run all of its applications and services through an Internet client, generally a web browser. The advantages of such an OS would be that it would run on a thin client, allowing cheaper, more easily manageable computer systems; it would require all applications to be designed on cross-platform, open standards; and would not tie a user's applications, documents, and preferences to a single computer, but rather place them in the Internet cloud. The Internet OS has also been promoted as the perfect type of platform for software as a service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mono (software)</span> Computer software project

Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible software framework. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. Mono can be run on many software systems.

References

  1. ↑ Amy D. Wohl (June 1993). "Apple and WordPerfect Announce OpenDoc". Amy D. Wohl' Opinions. Archived from the original on November 9, 2006. Retrieved April 24, 2007.
  2. ↑ Piersol, Kurt (March 1994). "A Close-Up of OpenDoc". Byte.com. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved April 24, 2007.
  3. ↑ Maletic, Greg (November 12, 2006). "OpenDoc". Greg Maletic's Blog. Retrieved April 24, 2007.
  4. ↑ "Macintosh vs Windows 95" (PDF). Apple Computer . Retrieved August 21, 2022. Application developers will be able to focus on writing small programs that do specific things, rather than creating entire suites. This will make it much easier for small, innovative software companies to get back in the industry....OpenDoc applications will be sold the way applications are sold today, and through the same channels. But as with any new technology, additional channels will evolve to capitalize on the technology's strengths. It is likely that over time on-line component warehouses will be used to distribute some OpenDoc applications. Interesting new on-line applications and services will be enabled by OpenDoc.
  5. ↑ "MacKiDo/History/History_OLE".
  6. ↑ "Computerworld". May 17, 1993.
  7. 1 2 Gaudin, Sharon (July 29, 1996). "IBM ships first batch of OpenDoc components". Computerworld. p. 14. Retrieved July 17, 2019.
  8. 1 2 "Vendors forge ahead with component application plans". Network World . March 27, 1995. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  9. ↑ Basal Gangster (April 17, 2020). "OpenDoc". The Long View. Retrieved June 24, 2020.
  10. ↑ Arni McKinley (December 19, 2006). "OpenDoc - Comment by Arni McKinley". Greg Maletic's Blog. Retrieved April 8, 2008.
  11. ↑ The CPU Project (February 2001). "Constructing Physics Understanding". San Diego State University. Archived from the original on May 9, 2008. Retrieved April 9, 2008.
  12. ↑ Kawamoto, Dawn; Anthony Lazarus (March 14, 1997). "Apple lays off thousands". CNET News.com. Retrieved April 24, 2007.
  13. ↑ Erick Schonfeld (October 6, 2011). "Jobs:Focus Is About Saying, No". TechCrunch.com. Retrieved October 6, 2011.
  14. ↑ Bob Hearn (2003). "A Brief History of ClarisWorks : Oregon". Bob Hearn's website. Retrieved April 24, 2007.
  15. ↑ Apple Inc. (October 26, 1998). "Technical Note TN1142: Mac OS 8.5". Archived from the original on April 20, 1999. Retrieved August 21, 2022.
  16. ↑ Apple (December 18, 2003). "AppleShare IP 6.3 Does Not Require OpenDoc". Apple Support. Retrieved April 24, 2007.[ permanent dead link ]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.