X/Open Co Ltd adopted the preliminary specification for its Sun Microsystems Inc-derived Federated Naming Service last week, which will enable network directory services and applications to interoperate across distributed environments, it says. Federated Naming Service will be available in August and is intended to be compatible with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture further down the line. X/Open also expects to see a full Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface for distributed authentication, which it adopted from the Internet Engineering Task Force, out by the end of the year. This will form part of DCE 1.1. And, as far as transaction processing standardisation goes, X/Open says the main problem lies in the diversity of communications resource managers, which use incompatible techniques such as request-response and message queueing to do the job. It is trying to develop a specification that caters not just for transaction processing monitors running under Unix, but also for existing mainframe-based systems, but says that it should know by the end of the year whether this task is possible or not. X/Open says it is not yet sure whether Open Systems Interconnection transaction processing is part of the problem – or the answer to it. The Reading-based standards keeper is also working with UniForum as part of the Joint Internationalisation Group to develop a guide to distributed internationalisation framework and services. The Group will issue a discussion white paper on its findings by the end of the year. The not-for-profit body is also working with European Computer Manufacturers Association on developing bi-directional, context-sensitive text handling extensions to XPG4.
