The European Commission kicked off its Deploy project last week with the aim of creating software compiler, development and testing tools based around Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format and TenDRA technologies developed by the Open Software Foundation and UK Defence Research Agency for use in getting a single application implementation up on multiple systems. The complete system envisaged under the scheme goes by the name of A-VIA, a typical piece of Eurospeak that stands for Architecture – the Virtual Interface for Applications. The idea is to house all private, standards group and European Community work in one place, with the ultimate aim of putting specifications into the public domain through X/Open Co Ltd. X/Open’s independent software vendor conversion and testing tool initiative is envisioned as a sub-component of Deploy. X/Open says it will establish some kind of action group that will develop an agenda relevant to Deploy in accordance with its User Council-defined open systems requirements, and feed its findings back into the Deploy process – and elsewhere. As indicated, it hopes to bring independent software vendors together to investigate problems and practical details of implementing application programming interfaces such as Spec 1170. What it doesn’t want to happen is for a single set of tools to emerge out of, and be controlled by, the Deploy developers.
