European standards bodies have salvaged plans for a European Common Applications Environment, sidestepping an embarrassing rejection of the X/Open Portability Guide as a fully-fledged standard. The European Workshop for Open Systems, EWOS, which among other activities prepares standards for balloting and approval by the formal European standards body CEN/CENELEC, the Comite European de Normalisation de l’Electrotechnique, has initiated development of a set of standards for applications portability by a newly formed CAE Expert Group. Standards developed by European Workshop will be forwarded to CENELEC for formal adoption as European standards. Under a European Commission directive already in force, European Community countries are under pressure to use European or international standards in each country. The European Workshop group’s tasks include delivering a series of draft standards specifying a common applications environment for use in Europe by 1992. X/Open had attempted to get the X/Open Portability Guide 3 adopted as a standard by CENELEC which got as far as voting in the proposal; but during the balloting process it became painfully apparent, according to observers, that XPG3 would be more or less unanimously rejected. This was not because of lack of technical merit, but because it was simply not written in an acceptable form; its format bears little resemblance to a conventional standards document, and it uses as references standards other than the acceptable International Standards Organisation or European standards, for instance. In other words, it should never have got so far in the first place. This embarrassing situation was resolved by suspending the ballot and voting to create the European Workshop group which is likely to use XPG3 as a starting point for its work. Initially, the European Workshop group will attempt to define a blueprint for what standards are needed and set specific timescales, before tackling the adoption of standards themselves, definition of portability profiles and associated conformance testing. In addition to producing standards, the group may also generate other documents such as implementation guides. European Workshop could begin to select standard common applications environment components this year but group chairman Luigi Bertuzzi would not specify delivery dates or the precise form of the group’s output, commenting that it was too early to say.
