The Object People

Canadian company founded in 1989 that started out as a Smalltalk consultancy with focus on training, later geared itself more towards custom and contract programming and did work on a large number of projects, including some work for IBM Smalltalk products. But although mostly a small part of their business, the company became best known for TOPLink, a relational database persistence layer for Smalltalk that later became a hot product after it was ported to Java.

TOP was originally based in Ottawa but later gained branch offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Southampton in England; Bonn, Germany and in Istanbul, Turkey. The company was split up into a development tools business and consultancy business in 2000 with the development tools being sold to "WebGain" and the consultancy business being acquired by a company called BEA (not that BEA though). Oracle later acquired both the development tools and the consultancy operation.

Products

 * TOPLink - Database connection/persistence classes for Smalltalk and Java - Commercial - Discontinued

Personnel

 * John Pugh (Founder)
 * Wilf LaLonde (Founder)
 * Paul White (Founder)
 * Donald Smith (TOPLink for Java product manager)
 * Boris G. Chr. Shingarov (TOPLink developer)
 * Alan Knight (TOPLink, sundry smalltalk products)
 * Wayne Beaton
 * Ron Charron
 * Charlene Benson (TOPLink developer)