Oracle Media Objects

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

Oracle Media Objects, formerly Oracle Card, was a multi-media software development tool for developing multi-media applications, with similar functionality and appearance to Apple Computer' HyperCard.

In the early days of HyperCard at least two alternative tools were created outside of Apple, Spinnaker's 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. OMO was used by Oracle to position itself in the video on demand market. At the time, it was thought that the video on demand market was about to become a booming industry, but this never occurred.

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 customers 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.

[edit] Initial Competitive Impact

Oracle Card was used by Oracle as a short term, stop gap measure to show that it was serious about client-server, GUI applications on Microsoft Windows, which at the time was increasing in demand and was often a driving factor in corporate selection of database vendors.

Before Oracle Card, Oracle did not sell any products that had significant GUI features. Oracle Forms 3 was character based and did not run under Microsoft Windows (although it ran under DOS). Oracle was desperately working on developing an upgrade (Oracle Forms 4) that had GUI features, but development was behind schedule and Oracle needed a product to position itself in the GUI marketplace.

As a stop gap measure, Plus was purchased (or licensed ?) from Spinnaker and enhanced to connect to Oracle databases.

It is unlikely that Oracle Card was used to develop many applications. It was notoriously difficult to use beyond creating very simple, one table data entry screens. Proof of its lack of use can be seen in the fact that a bug in the early production releases prevented it accessing database objects unless they were in the SCOTT schema (it added "SCOTT." to the start of each table that was queried). The appearance of this bug in a number of early production releases indicates that clients were not reporting data access bugs as they were not using the Oracle Card software.

After Oracle Forms 4 was released, Oracle stopped using Oracle Card in sales and marketing efforts and focused on Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports and Oracle Graphics.