Microsoft Corp has selected application development company Synon Corp, to help it encourage Windows NT developers to produce mission critical applications in NT 4.0 which can then be easily regenerated into NT 5.0 code when the long-awaited new release finally hits the streets. Larkspur, California-based Synon has teamed with Microsoft’s customer applications development unit in a scheme called Future in Focus, under which Microsoft seems to be attempting to ensure there are plenty of high-end applications ready to roll once NT 5.0 is launched. Obsydian users create a complete model of all business rules, data structure and communications, and a code generator then generates code for a variety of systems including AS/400, Windows NT, HP-UX and now Java. Microsoft developers will be encouraged to use Obsydian to model new applications, which will initially be generated in NT 4.0, and which will then be easily re-generated in NT 5.0. Synon says its code generators produce pure, native code, and in the case of the NT generator, it produces BackOffice logo-compliant applications. Synon claims productivity in the initial writing of applications is increased about two-fold using Obsydian – there is still a lot of work required initially in designing the system and consulting with business users – but where the big time savings come in, it says, is for changing systems, adding functionality, or migrating to new operating systems, where it reckons Obsydian is five to ten times faster than manual production. Last year, Computergram questioned exactly what Synon thought Obsydian was for (CI No 3,115). Well it seems the company sees its future as offering companies the ‘best of both worlds’ between bespoke software and packaged applications. Obsydian users can already create and save ‘patterns’ of common business rules and systems which can be re-used for other applications. What it is now in the process of doing is going out to third parties, to get them to create both horizontal and vertical ‘patterns’ or business templates, which can then be incorporated in Obsydian to cut down on the amount of modeling a company has to do. Typical patterns might be a general ledger system, or a financial application. The difference between this and the standard object approach, according to the company’s product marketing manager for Europe, Middle East and Asia, Dhunji Bilimoria, is that these ‘patterns’ will not be tied to one technology or operating system, since they can be generated in whichever system the user chooses to run. Bilimoria says the company’s plans for Obsydian are in three stages. The first, which it has now achieved, is to generate Java code. The second involves the company’s partnership with IBM Corp, under which it will take Java applications created under IBM’s San Francisco framework (CI No 3,206) and integrate them into Obsydian. The third phase is actually to use Obsydian to generate San Francisco-compliant applications, which IBM announced at the end of last year have to be created as components using Java Beans. Synon says the integration of San Francisco applications should be ready by the end of the summer, and it hopes to have San Francisco generation available early next year.
