Itaska Systems Inc of Minneapolis, Minnesota, has launched Release 2.2: the fourth release of its Itaska distributed object management system. The Itaska object database originated from the Orion research project begun in the mid-1980s at the Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corporation: Itaska began turning it into a product in 1989, and began shipping its first […]
Itaska Systems Inc of Minneapolis, Minnesota, has launched Release 2.2: the fourth release of its Itaska distributed object management system. The Itaska object database originated from the Orion research project begun in the mid-1980s at the Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corporation: Itaska began turning it into a product in 1989, and began shipping its first products in 1990. It now claims to have between 200 and 300 development customers in engineering, software engineering, computer-aided design and decision support market sectors. In the increasingly crowded field of object databases, Itaska claims to offer the technically strongest and most feature-rich product on the market, covering such areas as dynamic schema modification, language neutrality, multimedia support, security and authentication, the ability to run across multiple servers and active database techniques – where method code is stored and managed in the same manner as data. Release 2.2 adds an application programming interface for new and existing CLOS Common Lisp Object System applications, making the product more attractive to Lisp developers. Itaska already supports objects accessing the C, C++ and Lisp languages, is working on application programming interfaces for the Eiffel object language in conjunction with Tower Technology Corp and Ada with EVB Software Engineering Inc, and has plans for Smalltalk once it finds a partner to work with. Itaska runs on Sun Microsystems Sparc, IBM Corp RS/6000 and Digital Equipment Corp DECstations, and includes a suite of tools including the Active Editor for graphical user interface design. With 10 staff, Itaska says it intends to remain a closely focused object database company, relying on partners to help it provide exte sions such as Object SQL and a Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant interface. Lockheed Corp’s Austin division is using the database in its Falcon decision support system.
