While the world of commercial computer-aided software engineering tends to be dominated by the whims of IBM Corp blueprints, there is a growing market for software engineering in the Unix environment that many true blue third parties are attempting to straddle. Interactive Development Environments Inc, headquartered in San Francisco, California has been committed to developing a tool strategy for the Unix software engineering market since 1984 when it launched its Software through Pictures product. In June the company will launch its C development environment that will ensure that code and design are automatically made consistent and that will, furthermore, support both new and existing software engineering projects. This launch will involve tie-ups with Sabre, Framemaker and Interleaf software products.
Shared repository
Interactive Development founder Anthony Wasserman points out that a company committed to Unix from the start has advantages over vendors approaching software engineering from a proprietary viewpoint: for a start a product designed from scratch for Unix has to be multi-user from conception. Interactive already has a shared repository for use with its tools. However, for a company that likes to boast of an Open Architecture, such a repository is a bit of a liability and so the company is developing interfaces to open its tools up for use with other repositories. The architectural approach of Software through Pictures, called Visible Connections, involves published file formats and database schema and also provides templates for documents, reports and object annotations that are not tied into the C code. Software through Pictures also offers a programming interface to object management system and environment properties so that foreign tools can be supported. The software is built as a modular environment enabling separate tools to be individually invoked. At the presentation level the Software through Pictures toolkit is integrated with the windowing system appropriate for its environment – for example, the graphical tools use the SunView library on the Sun Microsystems Inc workstation and the DECwindows library in Digital Equipment Corp environments. The toolkit also offers integration at the file level and the database level – with each different type of symbol treated as a separate object type with properties. Information entered through the graphical editors or through an object annotation editor is generated into a shared repository, which is implemented as a set of relations in a relational database management system.
By Katy Ring
The tools are integrated via the database and the database is also used to integrate the tools with other products such as Frame Technology Inc’s FrameMaker by using object management routines to retrieve information from the repository and generate the intermediary form required. However, the key to providing consistent code and design as promised in Interactive Development’s forthcoming announcement will come via control integration. And this seems likely to be provided through the communication mechanisms to be found both in Atherton Technology Inc’s Software Backplane and in the Broadcast Message Server that is part of Hewlett-Packard Co’s SoftBench product. The latter mechanism, which Wasserman believes is the strongest offering in the field, enables tools to register with the Server to declare that they wish to receive messages of a certain type. Other tools then send messages to the Server, which transmits them to the tools that have registered to receive that type of message. Each tool can then take an appropriate action when it receives a message. The integration of foreign tools will occur through Interactive’s Object Management Library, which acts as an interface between the tools and the repository. Strangely for a company with such close links to Hewlett-Packard and that already has software engineering tools for the object-oriented programmer, Interactive is not a member of the Object Management Group, preferring to back the European Community’s Port
able Common Tools Environment – PCTE – for the determination of a standard Object Management System for data integration. For the object-oriented environment, Interactive offers upper CASE tools for Ada and C++ programmers as well as distributing Saber Software Inc’s C++ language. However Mike Thoma, the company’s vice-president of marketing, is evidently keen to draw a veil over the company’s object-oriented aspirations for the moment – one assumes that the job of persuading Information System managers that Unix is cool for software engineering is quite difficult enough without attaching a whole new software technology to the sales pitch. So the message from Interactive this year is that the management has chosen to bet the company on Unix.
Venture capital
Financially, the company is heading for a turnover of $25m this year and has recently received an injection of venture capital from both Thomson-CSF SA and the Mayfield Fund – these two organisations now each hold approximately 14% of the company. About a quarter of sales were outside the US in financial year 1991, and the company expects 33% of revenues to come from Europe by 1995. Thoma believes the market for Enterprise-Wide CASE for Unix can only grow because almost all software vendors are moving their tools over to Unix; it is much less expensive to run Unix mid-range boxes than it is to run proprietary mainframes; and the engineers required to develop real-time transaction processing systems tend to come from Unix backgrounds. Of course, there are other vendors with software engineering products for commercial Unix, such as Oracle Corp, but Thoma believes that Interactive Development’s marketing edge lies in the fact that Software through Pictures unashamedly embraces both the technical and commercial Unix markets. That is a marketing message that those software engineering vendors entwined with IBM and DEC have problems putting across with clarity.
