OWLNext
When Borland deprecated OWL in favor of VCL, a group of developers led by Yura Bidus started the project of maintaining the library in 1998. The original websites were http://owlnext.starbase21.com, http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Campus/5642/owlnext.html&date=2009-10-25+09:47:48 and http://members.xoom.com/yuri_b. Currently, the project is hosted by SourceForge: http://owlnext.sourceforge.net or http://www.owlnext.com. The extension is open source, free and the license allows the development of commercial applications.
The original name was OWL NExt, where the meaning of NExt was New Extensions. Later, it was joined to OWLNExt and currently, it is called OWLNext. The current version as of 2007 is OWLNext 6.20; the last version to officially support the Win16 platform.
OWLNext supports Unicode, even allowing developers to deploy Unicode-based applications in Win95. Added support for HTMLHelp.
OWL is still the property of Borland and is covered by several patents, however the version included in the 'Companion CD' for C++Builder can be downloaded from the current CodeGear site. The CodeGear site also allows developers to download the version 6.04 of OWLNext, but the official site for OWLNext is SourceForge.
Originally, OWL used BIDS (Borland International Data Structure) library as 'class library' (library for managing data structures like vectors, lists, etc.), OWLNext moved to STL (Standard Template Library), and also provides an emulation layer to minimize porting work for existing applications.
Linux support was added to OWLNext in version 6.16 using WINELIB, and there are also private ports to Solaris. These ports are now being integrated into the upcoming OWLNext 6.40. Win64 support is planned for a future release. Currently there is no plan to support the .NET platform since native Vista will allow better performance.
Read more about this topic: Object Windows Library