Having announced the thing way back in September 1989, IBM Corp is finally promising to have a completed version of its AD/Cycle software engineering-based application development environment by the end of the year and ready to ship to end users by the middle of 1994 – although it will bear little resemblance to the 1989 conception. The all-embracing AD/Cycle combines a set of standards and interfaces to speed up application development. The object-oriented framework will support IBM’s System Application Architecture systems as well as its AIX Unix systems. AD/Cycle comprises a view of the application development lifecycle, methodologies and tools to support the lifecycle plus software services such as languages for application development. Each tool can support one or more phases of the development lifecycle. AD/Cycle components include Information Model, which provides a common description of how data should be presented and used by tools. Also included is a set of workstation services – common routines used by tools and interfaces – library services, including a configuration management and application generator and a repository, which stores and manages the transformation and exchange of data. AIX Unix support will provide AD/Cycle developers with a common user interface – such as Presentation Manager or Motif – and task management services, which insulate the user from the details of tools within the framework. Other features include a message server network which controls the distribution of data among tools and services, data integration services, syntactic and semantic data descriptions, a data repository that maintains and manages data entities as well as objects and the relationship between them. IBM is also integrating parts of Hewlett-Packard Co’s SoftBench technology into AD/Cycle to provide a data control tool. AD/Cycle will be Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment- and Object Management Group Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant. It says AD/Cycle development kits will ship in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile to garner further third party support for AD/Cycle, IBM has signed Bayerische MotorenWerke AG affiliate Softlab GmbH, Munich, to its International Alliance programme, which now has eight members including KnowledgeWare Inc, Micro Focus Plc, Sapiens Software Inc, Digitalk Inc, Easel Corp, Viasoft Inc and Synon Inc. Each will bring its respective application development tools into line with AD/Cycle.
