San Francisco, California-based messaging middleware company PeerLogic Inc is still working on the IBM Corp System Object Model enabled version of its Pipes dynamic naming service (CI No 2,423), but has in the meantime cemented an agreement with Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, which will offer Pipes on Sinix Unix. It has also released Pipes version 3.6 which includes support for applications written in Visual Basic. Peer Logic, whose experience is in the runtime infrastructure underneath applications, said it does not care whether applications are created using object request brokers, application programming interfaces, software engineering, C or queuing mechanisms, its concern is how at runtime they can use Pipes’ dynamic name space ability. Meantime, although IBM Corp long ago finished the prototype of an integrated Pipes/MQ Series product, apparently neither it nor Peer Logic have decided whether to turn the thing into a product. IBM’s MQseries queuing software lacks dynamic naming and Pipes’ lacks queuing but the two messaging environments compete pretty much head-to-head in the market right now. The way Peer Logic sees it, all queuing systems are managed through the maintenance of tables, which is fine for a small number of systems, but makes dynamic, on the fly naming, a la Pipes, essential for large installations. So why not unbundle the Pipes dynamic naming service and license it to all comers in the messaging and partitioning world, rather than maintain it in a system that requires applications to be Peer Logic-aware? Because although right now whoever owns the data store owns the account, in future whoever owns the management of that data will own the account, the company believes. The company claims around a dozen large Pipes production sites and said it is currently looking at how to support as many object request brokers as possible. It may decide to offer one of the brokers tailored specifically for Pipes, or even create its own. It is particularly interested in Visual Edge Ltd’s ObjectMap system. Peer Logic, whose chief Bob Scher is also president of the Message Oriented Middleware Association, said the last thing the world needs is another standards body and, therefore, his association will not be playing that game. However, at Networld+InterOp a few weeks ago association members decided to begin defining services that are common to message oriented systems with the eventual aim of creating a common set of application programming interfaces, although nothing concrete is yet set.