Preface

This book presents Taligent's own story, as I've come to understand it, about Taligent technology: what it is, why it's important, and where the people who created it intend to take it.

Although this book is required reading for some of Taligent's programming classes, it isn't a programming manual. Instead, it presents a snapshot of Taligent's business, marketing, and technical plans--a snapshot taken before the beta versions of Taligent's first products were completed. However, the technical information in the book isn't limited to the first Taligent product release. It describes both technology that is part of the first release and, wherever possible, the rough outlines of technology under development for later releases.

Audience and structure

Inside Taligent Technology contains useful information for anyone who wants to begin learning about Taligent technology, including knowledgeable users, managers who make decisions about information systems, and computer professionals. It has two parts. Part I, "Introduction to Taligent technology," is for both programmers and nontechnical readers:

Chapter 1, "A new generation of applications," discusses recent trends in the computer industry and Taligent's vision of the role it can play.
Chapter 2, "The Taligent programming model," summarizes Taligent's approach to object-oriented programming (OOP) and introduces frameworks, the structures that underlie all Taligent programming.
Chapter 3, "A human interface for organizations," introduces some of the benefits for users that Taligent technology makes possible.
Chapter 4, "Taligent market development," describes the business and marketing strategy Taligent has adopted to achieve rapid high-volume deployment of its software products.
Chapter 5, "Development tools and approaches," introduces Taligent's development tools and describes how to get started as a Taligent developer.

You don't need to be an expert to understand these chapters. Anyone with an interest in computers should be able to grasp the basic concepts that underlie Taligent technology.

Part II, "CommonPoint system architecture," presents an overview of the CommonPoint application system, Taligent's flagship software product. These chapters are intended primarily as a reference for readers who have some familiarity with the principles of object-oriented programming and want to know more about CommonPoint capabilities in specific areas:

Chapter 6, "Introduction to the CommonPoint application system," introduces the CommonPoint system architecture and the notation conventions used in Part II.
Chapter 7, "Desktop frameworks," introduces the CommonPoint frameworks that are at the heart of the Taligent programming model. It explains how Taligent applies the OOP and framework concepts introduced in Chapter 2 to basic programming tasks such as representing data.
Chapter 8, "Embeddable Data Types," introduces some of the CommonPoint frameworks that provide ready-made data types for specific application domains such as text and graphics.
Chapter 9, "Graphics," describes CommonPoint capabilities in the areas of
2-D and 3-D graphics, graphics device drivers, fonts, and color.
Chapter 10, "Text," introduces the CommonPoint mechanisms for storing, styling, displaying, and inputting multilingual text.
Chapter 11, "Time media," describes the CommonPoint frameworks that support various kinds of time media, including audio, MIDI, video, and telephony.
Chapter 12, "Other Application Services," introduces the ways in which CommonPoint applications can interoperate with non-Taligent applications. It also describes CommonPoint capabilities in the areas of printing, scanning, and localization.
Chapter 13, "Enterprise Services," describes the high-level distributed computing services available to CommonPoint applications, including data access, concurrency control and recovery, system management, messaging, and remote object calls (ROC).
Chapter 14, "Foundation Services," describes basic programming services used by all CommonPoint applications and frameworks, including the notification mechanism, identifiers, storage, testing, and numerics.
Chapter 15, "OS Services," introduces low-level CommonPoint services such as communications, the file system, time services, runtime services, and microkernel services.

Part II doesn't describe how to program the CommonPoint system. You can find that kind of detailed information in the CommonPoint developer guides and related publications.

Sean Cotter

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