It now looks as if the Object Management Group’s request for technology for the Object Request Broker has turned into a two horse race between the Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems submission of the Distributed Object Management Facility, and the soon to be announced DEC and Microsoft submission. It seems likely that the other companies with technology in the ring will decide to support one or other of the unholy alliances, with just IBM in a position to shake things up further. Ironically, both of these joint submissions borrow from work undertaken with Alvey funding, work that is represented by the only UK submission to the Group – Cambridge-based Architecture Projects Management Ltd with its ANSAware product. From 1985 to 1989 the project ran in Cambridge under the technical guidance of Andrew Herbert with funding from the Department of Trade & Industry’s Alvey programme. Half the staff were direct employees and half were seconded from sponsoring companies such as Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, ICL Plc, STC Plc, Racal Electronics Plc, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, GEC Marconi Ltd and GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd.

ANSA Testbench

All involved were researching ways to implement full distributed computing and to find an agreed international standard to which they could all work. In 1987 the group produced the ANSA reference manual, which is updated every year, and to prove that the architecture was viable, a piece of software was developed called ANSA Testbench, which demonstrated distributed computing between Unix, VMS and MS-DOS. The Testbench was made robust enough for sponsors to see the possibilities of the architecture. They were then expected to go and build their own software but they didn’t, they took ANSA and used it as it was. In 1989 the funding began to run out, so it was decided that the consortium would be enlarged by going into Europe and getting Esprit funding. So it was that ANSA became part of the ISA project and welcomed more sponsors such as Siemens AG, France Telecom, L M Ericsson Telefon AB, Swedish Telecom, Chorus Systemes SA and Dowty/CASE Ltd. Meanwhile, aside from developing specifications for distributed computing, the ANSA team was developing and supporting the ANSA software. The sponsors decided that the lab should be put on a more secure financial footing, so the company Architecture Projects Management was set up to continue its research and development work but also to take its software out into the commercial world. Taking advanced technology out to users is difficult, as managing director Mike Eyre explains, a system of relevance had to be built.

By Katy Ring

This was done in Brussels at the Esprit conference last November when the Astrophysics Data System was demonstrated linking six databases and a working population of 600 users together. The system built by Ellery Systems Inc for NASA came in within time and under budget and worked. It was demonstrated by a Smithsonian professor who simply came on the stand and continued his research work as normal. The system’s users have only to learn the interface and do not need to learn how to interrogate the remote databases. Following on from such sucesses, Eyre believes that an international standard for distributed computing will be agreed by 1994 and that distributed computing will be in use by 2000. Aside from Esprit and the Open Systems Interconnection standardisation process, Architecture Projects is also working with US organisations such as the Object Management Group, the Open Software Foundation and Unix International. Architecture Project’s technical director Andrew Herbert claims that 70% of the structure of the Open Distributed Processing model adopted by OSI is derived from ANSA material. Furthermore, as is clear from the list of ANSA sponsors, Architecture Projects has allies in both the Open Software Foundation and Unix International. Herbert says that the feeling among members of Unix International is that Distributed Computing Environment has shortcomings, but that if they put forward their own model th

is would be seen as another split in the Unix community. Consequently, Unix International is concentrating on the next level of open distributed computing: how applications are to be written, working on the premise that he who controls the interface has greater control of the software. Herbert says that negotiations are ongoing with the Open Software Foundation, which may take out the bottom layers of ANSA and run them over the basic core of its distributed environment.

Great concern

Such a move would mean that the environment could work with other remote procedure calls and could therefore provide gateways between competing systems. For example, the ANSA Trader could be put on top of the environment, which when combined with Hewlett-Packard’s Location Broker, means among other things, that the software gateways could be policed to stop unauthorised objects crossing networks. This issue is apparently of great concern to IBM. However, the Foundation seems to have some problems with the idea of opening up the key technology and product areas that this would involve and is undecided about its next move. In fact, as Herbert points out, the Object Management Group request for technology for the Object Request Broker has brought advanced products to the attention of the wider public and is destabilising to the DCE world. For whereas, the Foundation and Unix International are dealing with this year’s issues, the Object Group is really looking two or three years ahead. But because the Group agenda requests commercially proven products be submitted, many vendors have been caught on the hop and rushed out with incomplete offerings that will probably fall over when examined by the Group technical committee. And furthermore, IBM and AT&T have yet to cast their dice. But whatever happens there will probably be a little piece of Alvey in the distributed computing systems of the future.