Sceptics of the genuine commercial benefits emerging from European-funded technology research projects will be interested in the developments now coming out of the Hansa research project. Hansa, which stands rather loosely for the Heterogeneous Application Generator Standard Architecture, is a project run by seven European partners, including Germany financial consultants J&J, French company Mimetics SA and Italian information provider O Group SpA, and is co-ordinated by Thorn EMI Plc, with a team at University College London acting as Thorn EMI’s associated partner, in charge of the Hansa framework and toolkit specification and implementation. Hansa’s aim is to produce an object-oriented framework for business decision support applications using domain-specific application generators, and en route to that aim, one of the spin-offs is an Object Linking & Embedding-style protocol for Unix that University College is now looking to exploit commercially. According to Sukhdev Khebbal, research fellow in the university’s computer science department, which is handling the Hansa project, the only similar commercial offering is Wind/U, the Windows-to-Unix portability toolkit that enables Windows and Visual C++ applications to run as native Motif applications. The product comes from Bridgefield, Connecticut-based Bristol Technology Inc and has been positioned as a high cost, high productivity tool. Copyright for the Hansa cross-system protocol is shared between the Univesity and Thorn EMI, but the latter is apparently showing little interest in exploiting it, while the new impetus from the European Commission research programme is to encourage commercial use of the results. University College is also working to extend the Hansa framework to enable personal computer-to-Unix interoperability using Common Object Request Broker Architecture and TCP/IP to enable an application built from various components to reside across a network of different machines. Under the main Hansa project, application generators are being constructed in four business areas, including direct marketing, stock market trading, insurance, and executive information systems, with the framework based on Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking & Embedding, Object Management Group Object Request Broker and Document Oriented Interface.
