IBM Object REXX

IBM Object REXX is an object-oriented programming language suited for beginners as well as experienced OO programmers.

It was originally released in versions for OS/2 and AIX that offered integration with SOM 2.1 and had some limited graphic functionality, but IBM later made versions available for Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris that were fully independent of SOM, note that unlike the OS/2 version the AIX and Windows versions were all paid seperate commercial products. Sun Solaris (SPARC) and Linux versions were available as-is.

History

When IBM decided in 1988 to standardise on Smalltalk as their language of choice for future application development it became obvious that it would be beneficial if other tools from the company could offer a degree of compatibility with the object model that Smalltalk offered. This lead to amongst other things the development of the CORBA derived System Object Model and the closely related Distributed System Object Model (DSOM) but it also became obvious that it would be better if REXX, which was heavily used in IBM systems as a glue language, could operate with the object-oriented paradigm as well, this alongside a general interest in O-O languages at the time lead Simon C. Nash (IBM UK) later in 1998 to start experimenting with merging the REXX language with the object model of Smalltalk under the code name Oryx.

IBM showed the first prototype of the Object REXX language at the 1992 REXX Symposium on an OS/2 2.0 machine and by the 1993 the language had gained graphical user interface class libraries for both OS/2 Presentation Manager and OSF/Motif on AIX, a development environment that includes a class browser, an interactive debugger and object inspector, and integrated support for OS/2 WPS object via SOM. In 1994 IBM announced that development the Object REXX would replace Classic REXX as the default REXX interpreter in the next release of OS/2, but that came with the promise that it would be "100% compatible with Classic REXX" and that development was now in the hands of a team run by Rick McGuire. At the same time the company announced a few extensions to the language in addition to the O-O features already included but amongst new language features were expressions in stems, parse enhancements, Countstr and Changestr functions, extended Do and date conversion.

Object REXX was finally released in beta form in 1995 as part of the IBM Developer Connection Volume 6 and in GA form as part of the release of OS/2 Warp Version 4 and shortly thereafter as a seperate download for users of OS/2 Warp Version 3 and OS/2 Warp Server Version 4. However that release proved to be something of an anticlimax, the language was not 100% backwards compatible as had been promised, breaking not only a lot of third party REXX scripts but was also incompatible even with a number of scripts supplied on the OS/2 Warp 4 CD. The visual development environment and large portions of the GUI class library IBM had shown were missing from the package after the developers of similar development environments for Classic REXX complained and threatened to withdraw all support for IBM products from the market (it turned out that a couple of other visual development environments for Classic REXX from IBM were never released for the same reason).

Products

Object REXX for OS/2
Object REXX for AIX
Object REXX for Windows

Object REXX Interpreter Edition (1996)
Object REXX Development Edition (Summer 1997)

Object REXX plus IBM Object REXX Workbench (GUI development & debugging) and sundry tools like tokenisers & linkers etc.
Object REXX for SUN/Solaris
Object REXX for Linux

OS/2 Version

OS/2 versions

6.00 (12 Jul 1996) - included in Warp 4
6.00 (21 Jul 1997)
6.00 (11 Nov 1997) - Warp Fixpak 6
6.00 (25 Mar 1998) -
6.00 (18 May 1999) - IBM FTP Update

Known issues

Object REXX for OS/2 is known to have issues with Object Desktop, specifically some of the WPS integration features of OD clash with the Direct WPS-support of OREXX, if you do not use the direct WPS-support you can fix this by uninstalling it using "wpsinst -". There was a similar issue with DeskMan/2 but it is believed that these were fixed in the end. In either case make sure you are running the 1999 version of OREXX, it fixes a WPS integration initialisation bug that helps in both cases.

License and availability

Originally commercial software, distributed with base operating system component of OS/2 Warp Version 4 and later releases, separate update for Warp 3. Discontinued.

Publications

IBM Redbooks

Links

ZP97-0108 (1997-02-25) IBM Object REXX Now Runs on Windows NT and Windows 95