IBM Corp issued a statement yesterday confirming that it is expanding the role of AD/Cycle to support application development at the workgroup level – moving to the local area network-based software engineering environment it is already offering for its AIX Unix users – but managed to avoid mentioning what was intended to be the core of AD/Cycle, Repository Manager/MVS at all. The company is understood to have abandoned development of the Repository altogether (CI No 1,970), and the switch of strategy leaves the whole AD/Cycle concept in complete disarray, though the company says that it is reaffirming support for the AD/Cycle tools available today: to do anything else would leave the company open to all manner of retaliation from AD/Cycle International Alliance Members. The company claims that customers say that they want to do their development at the workgroup level in an open systems environment, on a range of hardware and under different operating systems, and to share data in a decentralised development environment, rather than have it all tied to the Repository on the mainframe server. IBM indicates that it will salvage what it can from the collapse of its strategy, saying it will bring together the best platform functionality from our AD/Cycle and AIX CASE work. IBM says that it will bring into AD/Cycle many of the features existing in the recently delivered AIX Software Development Environment Workbench/6000 which sounds like a signal victory for and endorsement of Hewlett-Packard Co’s approach since Workbench/6000 is based on the Softbench Broadcast Message Server licensed from Hewlett-Pack ard. IBM, which had insisted that there would be parallel and separ ate development strategies for MVS and OS/2 on the one hand, and for Unix on the other, now says that the switch will lead to a consist ent development environment for OS/2 and AIX. A single object- oriented class library for user interface code will make it easier for tool builders to move between the CUA91 Common User Access stand ard of another collapsed IBM initi ative, Systems Application Archit ecture, and Motif in AIX CASE. IBM also says that AD/Cycle and AIX CASE tool builders will be able to support both OS/2 and AIX develop ment systems with a minimum of incremental effort which seems to suggest that the same will apply to applications developed with either, making it easier for users to hedge their bets by making their new mainframe applications migratable to the generality of Unix environ ments. IBM will indeed also incor porate the Portable Common Tools Environemnt from the European Comp uter Manaufacturers Association, as revealed by Computer Weekly. An AD Information Model for sharing dev elopment data will use an object- oriented database, IBM commented.
