ObjectWare products are integrated into the COOL:Gen open architecture and are developed using the Visual SmallTalk environment. These tools run under Windows NT, Windows and 98/2000 and access the COOL:Gen MVS Central Encyclopedia (CE), the Client Server Encyclopedia (CSE), or local files using the COOL:Gen Application Programming Interface (API).

ObjectWare value-added solutions are designed to work with the development environments supported by COOL:Gen. In keeping with trends in Client/Server architectures, our tools have been designed as workstation-based applications that read data from COOL:Gen environments on numerous and widely deployed computing platforms.

The CA Open Initiative program makes this possible - it provides API's which allow third party software to access information in the various COOL:Gen encyclopedias and on local workstations. Sterling Software;s strategy in providing this capability is to bridge COOL:Gen through operating/database vendor software - such as SQL-Net and DB2/Connect - to the environment in which the data is stored (Oracle, MVS-DB2, SQL Server).

ObjectWare currently supports the following clients and servers. A client is defined as an operating system where ObjectWare tools execute. A server is defined as a location from which encyclopedia data can be accessed. Additional client server combinations will be added as Sterling Software initiates support.