A year and a bit after its makeover, the Open Software Foundation’s board has signed the first of its new-fangled Pre-Structured Technology processes into life. Development of version 1.2 of the Distributed Computing Environment is being funded by Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Hitachi Ltd and IBM Corp. The Software Foundation does not expect to see any change out of $20m once the work is complete. Core code will be frozen in July, early releases will go to Foundation investors by the end of the year and initial products are expected to come to market by mid-1996. The Software Foundation has not decided how version 1.2 components will be delivered: it is weighing up releasing the technology in two tranches, DCE 1.2.1 and 1.2.2. DCE 1.2, a near-term project as far as the Software Foundation is concerned, calls for the development of better integration with other distributed environments, including the ability to share files with, and provide administration across, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Open Network Computing environment and Novell Inc’s NetWare. Version 1.2 will also include registry synchronisation, enabling Open Network Computing and NetWare users to access the Distributed Computing Environment Security Registry. As well as the promised public key encryption log-in, principals from a foreign cell can be added to a group in a local cell. It also features a new C++-to-Distributed Computing Environment Interface Definition Language compiler for distributed object development and support for single-threaded development application environments on client systems. There will be better scaling, security and naming functionality plus DFS 1.2, the new cut of the Transarc-based Distributed File System. From here on, the Software Foundation is floating Distributed Computing Environment development down.
