Oracle Media Objects

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oracle Media Objects (OMO)
OMO Screenshot
Developer:	Oracle
Latest release:	1.1.2 / 1998 (last date FAQ was updated)
OS:	System Software 6, System 7, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9
Use:	hypermedia, development
License:	Proprietary
Website:	N/A

In the early days of HyperCard at least two alternative tools were created outside of Apple Computer, Spinnaker Plus and SuperCard. Plus was very much like HyperCard, with the notable distinction of being cross-platform, operating on both the Macintosh OS and Windows. SuperCard was Mac-only at the time, and is still a shipping product.

Plus went on to become more than one product. One variation was WinPlus, which was a Microsoft Windows only version of the program. Another was Oracle Card, distributed by Oracle. First released in 1991, Oracle Card was essentially a redistribution of the Plus runtime engine along with external libraries for establishing connections to RDBMS engines such as Oracle and DB2. As such, Oracle Card stacks could execute queries and associate their results with native variables, making Oracle Card one of the first RDBMS application development environments to support cross-platform development.

A few years later, Oracle acquired the Plus source code from Format Verlag and developed it to become Oracle Media Objects (often referred to by users as OMO). OMO didn't last very long, with development ceasing after version 1.1.2. Many customers of Oracle that were making large purchases of its core database technology received copies of OMO thrown into the deal. Consequently, an unknown amount of IT development internal to these cusotmers was conducted on the OMO platform. Commercially, there were very few products built using the tool. Amongst these were the "Our Secret Century" series of CD-ROMs published by The Voyager Company (the series was intended to be 12 discs, and 10 did ship before Voyager's CD-ROM line was acquired by another company, leaving the remaining two discs unfinished) and Inside Independence Day made by ACES Entertainment.

[edit] Unique Features of OMO

OMO had the unique distinction of not only its stacks being cross-platform, but also its external libraries (XCMDs). For that purpose, a small subset of the Mac OS memory management commands (Handles) were ported to other platforms. In addition, OMO sported a modular design where every type of object was actually implemented as a plugin file in an "Objects" folder.

OMO's object types included both the standard controls available in other HyperCard clones of the time (buttons, text fields, draw and paint graphics), as well as more complex controls like a spreadsheet field, and non-control items that could be placed on a card but were invisible at runtime, like timers that could be scheduled to send messages after a specified time.