! to the table of contents
< to the previous section:
> to the next section:
OpenStep will be the next release of NeXT's NEXTSTEP with the ability to be OS independent (NEXTSTEP depends on MACH). Therefore OpenStep will run on Windows 95, Windows NT, MACH, Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX and DEC OSF/1.
The architecture of OpenStep was made public in late 1995 and since then GNU is working on a public port of OpenStep to e.g. X11 based UNIX systems.
To express the new standard, OpenStep for MACH is now the correct spelling for the formerly named NEXTSTEP product by NeXT, but it is known that NeXT itself is still using the same version numbering scheme for at least the MACH product line, so the first release of OpenStep for MACH is equivalent to NEXTSTEP 4.0.
OpenStep is supposed to be an industry standard for developing object oriented, system independent, scalable solutions for client/server architectures. It was adopted by Sun, Hewlett Packard and Digital. It provides distributed applications through PDO (Portable Distributed Objects) and D'OLE (Distributed OLE) based on CORBA. The usage of EOF supplies object persistence with traditional relational databases. And finally with WebObjects, objects are accessible through the internet or in your own private network.
OpenStep, like NEXTSTEP 3.3 provides several kits for software developers like: Application Kit and Foundation Kit as well as Display PostScript. Applications written for OpenStep are sourcecode compatible to all other architectures running OpenStep, although FAT binaries are only available under OpenStep for MACH.
For the NEXTSTEP user OpenStep doesn't take away old known features. In addition with OpenStep for MACH you will get MACH enhancements and a new GUI as an option as well as all the known advantages of OpenStep itself. Old applications will continue to run under OpenStep for MACH and need to be recompiled to run under Windows 95, Windows NT, Solaris, HP-UX and other OpenStep platforms.
Because OpenStep isn't already released, this section is just speculating and based on information from the usenet community. OpenStep is sheduled for quarter two 1996.