With the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and European Commission Esprit project now backing it, the Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format applications portability mechanism has now achieved the critical mass needed to drive it to market, believes Open Software Foundation chief technologist Ira Goldstein. Indeed, at least one unspecified outfit is thought to have decided that the Architecture-Neutral Format is commercially viable now. However, while the Architecture-Neutral Format is unlikely to appear on the market this year, Goldstein says that the Foundation plans to hold a conference on the technology at the end of the year, to find out which companies are interested in bringing the stuff to market and how it can be best introduced to an industry audience already blinded by science. Goldstein fully expects an Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format product programme to be initiated during 1994. Since its conception, the Format has been winning hearts and minds as a useful mechanism. It should enable software vendors to write and distribute a single version of an application that will run unchanged on the generality of laptops, workstations and large-scale systems. The problem has been how to get get it out of the labs and into the industry, and I can’t tell what’s going to happen when the horses are led to water, admits Goldstein.
Concerted
Apart from a concerted effort by its backers, which could be shaped at the end of year meeting, Goldstein says only catalytic events will otherwise drive the Architecture-Neutral Format to market. Things like a single influential company adopting the Architecture-Neutral Format unilaterally for portability across multiple hardware and operating system environments; a standards body like X/Open Co Ltd, IEEE or the US National Institute for Standards and Technology mandating it; government procurement bodies insisting on it; or a significant new technology coming to market on it. The Architecture-Neutral Format specification is now complete and a beta release will be testing later this year. In fact most outstanding problems were ironed out over the last couple of months, Goldstein says; bug fixing remains. Commercial quality Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format installers will become available for a range of architectures, as will a reference implementation of the thing using public domain GCC compilers. All property rights to the Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format are owned by the UK’s Defence Research Agency, which developed and subsequently licensed the technology Format to the Software Foundation and Unix System Laboratories Inc – licences are available from both.
