CASEing the joint: as much light as heat generated at Wembley Exhibition Centre Last week’s heatwave in the UK didn’t put off the enthusiastic visitors to the 1989 Software Tools exhibition held in London’s Wembley Exhibition Centre, though at some of the more popular stands visitors felt they were getting a free sauna thrown in with the product demonstrations. DEC to support some of Systematica’s Virtual Software Factory products… At the show DEC announced that it is to support some of Systematica Ltd’s Virtual Software Factory products on its systems – the analyst-designer workbench packages are to be manufactured, marketed and supported by DEC throughout Europe under a software agreement. First to become available will be HOOD-SF, the commercial version of the workbench built by Systematica for the European Space Agency. Priced at UKP8,500 on VAX/VMS systems, it includes DECwindows and DECnet support, and Ultrix versions will follow in a couple of months. HOOD-SF supports the Hierarchical Object Orientated Design method, and incorporates automatic Ada generation. Towards the end of the year, SSADM-SF will become available, supporting the Structured System And Design Methodology, which is mandated by the Central Computer & Telecommunications Agency for all UK civil government projects. DEC’s UK computer-aided software engineering marketing manager Chris Martin says that it will be developed to include the new version 4 of SSADM when it appears in October. …and announces a new release of VAXset with DECwindows support DEC also revealed a new release of VAXset, its package of software engineering tools – it now includes DECwindows support, as well as the availability of XD Ada MC68020 V.1 – a family of cross development tools for developing real time Ada solutions, launched in conjunction with SD-Scicon in Madrid at the Ada Europe Conference last week. And DEC says that VAX Ada V.2, VAXeln Ada V.2, VAX Lisp V.3 and VAX Document V1.2 are also now available. Cognos gives the prototype of its new PowerCASE its first UK outing Cognos Software was itself much in evidence at the show, with the prototype version of PowerCASE, a software engineering development package developed with Systematica’s VSF, (see this page), running on a Sun-3/60 workstation. Using Cognos’ own design methodology the tool enables designers to develop a system through each phase in the standard life cycle model right down to coding in Cognos’ own PowerHouse 4GL. Versions for Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX and Apollo machines are said to be under development. Pricing and availability will be revealed later this year. In addition it is thought that Cognos software will be developed to run under AIX on IBM’s AS/400 – the first IBM has heard about AIX going onto the AS/400! – where it is already featured under OS/400. Cognos is also to set up a Research and Development Centre at its European headquarters in Bracknell, Berkshire. There are reported to be around 3,500 sites worldwide using the range of Cognos software, about 700 of which are in the UK. Systematica backs DEC with new company As a result of the deal with DEC, Systematica has formed a separate subsidiary, Systematica Digital Products, to service DEC and its customers. Based in Bournemouth, Hampshire, Systematica Ltd is getting hard to ignore. Cognos Inc, the Canadian software house recently signed up for the Virtual Software Factory, and more recently Information Builders Inc announced that its new Focus Application Creation Tool was built using it. Systematica says that the product, the first parts of which were released in 1987, pulled in UKP2m of sales in its first year of marketing. Yourdon gives Cradle a first rocking UK Eastman Kodak Co company Yourdon Ltd, based in London, used the show to launch a multi-user software engineering tool called Cradle, which runs on Apollo Computer workstations at present, but will be implemented for Sun Microsystems workstations and DEC VAX systems by December. Like many other tools on show at the exhibition Cradle is a development environment that encompasses
the system design lifcycle through most of its stages. A 10-user licence costs UKP30,000. It supports Yourdon’s own structured method, YSM, which is claimed to improve on SSADM by incorporating a real time element for the development of real time systems, and generates code in Ada, C and Pascal. In addition, a version that incorporates object-orientated design capability will be available from the end of the year. Yourdon’s software previously ran only on MS-DOS personal computers, and there are reckoned to be around 600 sites that are currently using its applications. Interactive Development offers Object Oriented Structured Design Interactive Development Environments Ltd of Sutton in Surrey, was showing off a computer-aided software engineering environment for its Object Orientated Structured Design approach, which merges traditional top-down concepts with object orientation. It extends Booch’s object orientated design notation for Ada, and supports object orientated languages such as C++, Eiffel and Smalltalk, as well as Fortran, Pascal and C. Prototypes are available for Sun Microsystems and Apollo Computer workstations. UK SSADM to merge with French Merise? Harmonisation is all the rage in European circles these days, and we won’t be surprised if we get to hear of a European Directive to harmonise our languages by at the end of the sentence the verbs putting as the Germans do. The UK Department of Trade & Industry is reported to be working on a project to merge its SSADM Structured System And Design Methodology with its French equivalent, called Merise, with a view to achieving common European system design methodologies after 1992.
