Guiding principles

Fully object oriented. Taligent system software products implement a completely new application programming model based on object-oriented technology. This means not only that developers can create new solutions more quickly, but also that the CommonPoint application system and other Taligent products can be extended by adding new technology without making development tools temporarily obsolete or requiring two or three years between releases. The system is constructed for growth. It's not intended to solve everyone's problems right away. Instead, Taligent is starting out with a highly flexible architecture, listening carefully to its customers as they begin using it, and planning for growth as new technologies emerge.
Open and extensible at all levels. The CommonPoint application system is open and extensible at all levels. It is designed to promote third-party innovation in system software domains as well as traditional application domains, and it provides frameworks explicitly designed for this kind of development.

Portable, adaptable, and scalable. Any Taligent framework can be customized or entirely reimplemented by any developer. If someone has special insights into databases, for example, the Data Access framework is just as accessible as any others. This allows vendors of different SQL connectivity modules to support their proprietary interfaces via the data access frameworks, but it also means that individual programmers who want to provide new kinds of database services to users can do so in a variety of ways that are independent of any specific SQL implementation.

Integrated development tools. The cpProfessional development environment is built around an object-oriented project database designed to help programmers explore, reuse, and extend existing code, rather than creating code from scratch. Taligent's development tools are fully object oriented and framework based, like the CommonPoint system, so that tool developers can extend and replace these frameworks just as they can extend or replace system frameworks. In addition to providing a state-of-the-art object-oriented programming environment of its own and encouraging third-party tool development, Taligent supports host system tools for the operating systems on which the CommonPoint application system runs.
Rich capabilities. The CommonPoint system includes a wide range of software capabilities that developers can easily incorporate in their applications, including object embedding and linking, drag and drop, multilevel undo, and many other basic human interface features; collaboration; scriptability; interoperability with OpenDoc and OLE; 2-D and 3-D graphics; international Unicode text throughout the system; time media support; sophisticated data access querying abilities; and broad support for distributed computing.