Is all or any of this object stuff actually working? That’s one question which if it wasn’t, then certainly should have been addressed at last week’s Object Group meeting in Salt Lake City. With every vendor, independent software vendor and their dog claiming the Object Group and Corba-compliance – or at the very least to having object versions of their technology (but hang on, wasn’t that open systems, sorry, client-server?), the situation is getting very confused.
Good for tecchies
Part of the problem is that real Object Group-based object implementations are little more than development systems, good for tecchies but not much use for anyone else. Meanwhile, the object applications that are around don’t appear to be any more portable than their predecessors and first-generation object request broker implementations are incompatible. Indeed, where object-based systems, such as distributed computing and management services, have been tested at customer sites, a new crop of problems are already emerging, say integrators. In particular where, for example, a new object-based systems management environment has been implemented alongside some existing management tools a user wants to keep, the result is often described as an object storm. This is where requests from the different tools do battle with each other across a network in trying to reach and return from their targets. The only way around it, the frustrated integrator admitted, is to implement the new system, and only the new system, from scratch. The fact that these problems are said to be associated with certain technology implementations may be due more to the fact that as yet there just aren’t that many products around, rather than to a specific vendor’s techniques. Nevertheless, with a slew of object paradigms around the corner, it’s a problem vendors could do well to address now. Part of the problem may lie in the need for a single set of object services for applications and tools or object request broker so that all applications see the same interface. Indeed, object storms may just be the younger brothers and sisters of so-called network storms, the subject of discussion in other circles – and exactly the reason that there are now multiple efforts to provide integrated network and distributed computing services users are more likely to buy.
