X/Open Co Ltd has completed its fast-track review of Spec 1170 and expects to have finished documentation in the next couple of weeks. The specification is based on formal and de facto standards and on Application Programming Interfaces from 50 of the most commonly installed applications. About 10 were specifically pulled apart to examine calls, including AutoCAD, Informix and WordPerfect. Spec 1170 is expected to remain stable for the next three years at least. X/Open will use the UK Defence Research Agency’s TenDRA Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format technology as the basis of a conformance test suite, plus its own version of the Sun Microsystems Inc-derived Assertion Definition Language, which is supposedly more semantic, to automate analysis functions. Testing should begin in the fourth quarter by vendors and third parties, not by X/Open, and any operating system can be branded Unix, as long as it conforms to the Spec – although X/Open admits this is bound to cause a certain amount of confusion in the marketplace initially. The standards body will henceforth categorise its specifications as operating system-dependent – that is Unix, or operating system-neutral if they conform to X/Open Portability Guide standards. Services in distributed environments will be classed as operating system independent. We will not be seeing a global XPG5 standard, however, X/Open says it will simply broaden the scope of XPG4 to include real-time, security, internationalisation and sockets. Segmented shared memory standards will be phased out in future versions in favour of a messaging-based approach so as to support massively parallel computing. Meanwhile, X/Open says it will offer preliminary systems management specs – based on the Tivoli Management Environment – to the Object Management Group. It reckons all systems management will eventually be based on CORBA and the Distributed Computing Environment Remote Procedure Call. The organisation expects to have preliminary specifications for performance management and back-up services out this year, software distribution and distributed management guidelines out during 1995. According to X/Open, it will also begin fast-tracking the Common Desktop Environment specification, now being looked after by its Desktop+ working group, in mid-November. Products are not expected until March 1995 at the earliest. When Common Desktop version 1.0 is complete, the Open Software Foundation will take over development via its Pre-Selected Technology process and will hand any enhancements back to X/Open for ratification. Desktop+ hopes to get its hands on X Consortium’s X11.5, PEX and XIE graphics specifications as well as Motif, OpenDoc and Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking & Embedding and expects to ‘collaborate’ with the Interactive Multimedia Association, the Workflow Management Coalition, the Black Forest Consortium workflow user group and the Desktop Management Task Force in the near future.
