The newly-formed ComponentWare Consortium has won $4m funding from the US government to pursue development of re-usable software. The seven members are the BBN Systems & Technologies arm of Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc, Heuristicrats Research Inc, I-Kinetics Inc, Iona Technologies Ltd, NetLinks Technology Inc, Pratt & Whitney Co, and SunSoft Inc. The consortium is led by I-Kinetics. The consortium’s goal is to package data and applications as standard, re-usable software components using emerging distributed object management frameworks such as the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture or Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking & Embedding-Common Object Model. The consortium says it will submit its developments to the Object Group for adoption. Each member will contribute and integrate ComponentWare technologies. Iona is extending Orbix with object groups and fault-tolerant services. SunSoft will supply Distributed Objects Everywhere for workflow. NetLinks Technologies will build new developer tools for its ORBitize Object Request Broker development tool. Heuristicrats Research will develop security and data analysis components. BBN plans to develop distributed monitoring and system management components. The first consortium component is I-Kinetics’s ObjectPump which is claimed to transform any Unix application or data source into a component. The next release of ObjectPump, due this spring, will incorporate consortium developments in security, fault-tolerance and workflow services. The US Naval Sea Systems Command government agency is hosting the consortium’s largest deployment project, a nationwide system for logistics planning and management workflow integration in support of the US Navy.
