Over 75 companies come together to give Unified Unix their blessing
More than 75 different companies banded together last week in New York to show their support for the Unix industry’s new common application programming interface specification. While the suits in the billion dollar row – roughly translated as the COSE people – took a back seat, factotums from the Open Software Foundation, Unix International Inc, X/Open Co Ltd, Computer Associates International Inc, DHL Worldwide Express and a sole analyst in the form of Marc Shulman, president of the Technology Strategies Group, addressed a rather sparse audience – several had to be dragged back from holiday. There seemed to be some agreement on exactly how many APIs would be included in the specification, with people coming up with a different number each time. However, on the final count, it came to 1,170. Everyone agreed that 90% of all vendors’ systems would be supported though. The specification was described as an extension to X/Open’s Portability Guide release 4 – and X/Open’s APIs will apparently compromise about 50% of the finished item. The other APIs are based on the System V Interface Definition and Open Software Foundation’s Application Environment Specification, as well as 10 different independent software vendor application sets, including those of Informix Inc, Autodesk Inc and WordPerfect Corp. The applications were chosen on the basis of market share and the aim was to cover all technology areas, from graphics to databases.
Initial draft
The initial draft specification is available from the Open Software Foundation and Unix International, both of which will head up the industry review. The draft will go to X/Open in November, and the approval process is expected to take from then till perhaps 1995. Branding will start within the next 12 months. Apparently there are moves afoot radical enough to want to distill the new common Unix application programming interface down as far as putting it all in one place: namely, between the covers of a single book. By contrast, individual vendors have never codified what it takes to optimise for their code. Seemingly a no brainer, the issue is apparently still under discussion. Timing is the crucial issue with this new common OS/API. However it will be at least the middle of next year before anything real starts to materialise in the way of the first compliant operating systems. By then, Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT should be on its second iteration. Organisers of the event said the thing got started about six weeks ago and expanded as ever more firms were tapped. But some half the 50-odd concerns involved did jump until the last minute, many said to have been nudged along by the recent Wall Street Journal article. Others like Fujitsu Ltd and Intergraph Corp were too late but they will participate.
API unification should rationalise Unix software efforts, insists their guardian, X/Open
X/Open Co Ltd says it challenged the industry to come up with a common set of application programming interfaces for Unix some 18 months ago (when rumours of the so called Unity II peace talks began – but that it took the new climate ushered in by the COSE desktop initiative in San Francisco last March to get things going. But as a result, the Common OS API specification is now complete, and it’s the review process that will take up the time until the final version is made available in the second quarter of next year. X/Open’s Mike Lambert calls the approach a unification, rather than the intersection approach of Posix and XPG4, which focused on the APIs that were common between varying Unix implementations, resulting in a low functionality common base from which implementation could begin. That approach is still valid, insists Lambert, if what is required is a set of generic services across a broad range of systems, and will remain the basis for such systems as Digital Equipment Corp’s OpenVMS and (so we are assured) Microsoft Corp’s NT. The new unification, however, draws a lasso around all the commonly used APIs and includ
es the lot. Specifically, that means Unix System Laboratories Inc’s System V Interface Definition Edition 3 Level 1 base APIs, full use APIs from the Open Software Foundation’s AES Operating System Programming Interfaces and other widely used interfaces such as Berkeley 4.3 Reno Sockets and TCP/IP. Additionally, around 50 leading Unix applications were analysed to obtain API usage data. Lambert calculates that the total number of APIs included is 1,300, 650 of them from XPG4. He doesn’t expect the review process will change much of the work already done, but it must be carried out for the specification to be properly legitimised. A distinctive brand, supplementary to XPG4, will be awarded to conformant systems and software. Rather than make kernel level changes, the easiest way for hardware vendors to implement the new specification, says Lambert, will be to put in place a thin interface layer between the operating system and applications interface, an approach that DEC has already taken with its Habitat system, and IBM Corp is planning with Taligent on the AS/400. There’s no suggestion that UnixWare, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and the rest will go away on the contrary, these will continue to be developed and no doubt fitted out with added value features not included within the spec, just as before. But unlike Posix, the new specification is broad enough to embrace fully functional applications, many of which will run from Day One. It should save independent software vendors considerable sums on developing and supporting multiple proprietary APIs, and cut conversion time down from weeks to days. Ideally, this could result in lower software prices. Although there is obviously a danger of a gradual re-fragmentation as more value is added, Lambert says it will not be in anybody’s interest to stray too far. We have no obligation to track any single vendor. This specification is arrived at by industry consensus. Make no mistake – this will be the future tool for procuring all Unix systems, he insists.
Sunsoft claims that Solaris 2.x is 95% compliant
SunSoft Inc’s Solaris 2.x is 95% compliant with the combined Unix API says SunSoft, and will be 100% compliant by the release we’re planning in October 1994, according the firm’s Dave Richards. Current applications will be carried over. Meanwhile, 90% of its work on moving to Solaris 2 has now been completed, and will be finished by Christmas, he promises.
Microsoft decides to sit this one out with NT
X/Open’s Mike Lambert says that he has been inundated with telephone calls from companies keen to endorse the new common API, and that just about everyone in the industry aside from Microsoft Corp wants to be involved. There is no technical reason why Microsoft couldn’t endorse the new initiative and get NT to conform to it – except that it would be a huge amount of work and many years before anything real could be put in place.
