contents:
|
|
Customer demand for advanced information systems continues to increase as business becomes globalised and highly competitive. Meanwhile, the technology needed to support this has become complex in the extreme. The industry has reached a stage where no customer can survive without business alliances and no supplier can meet the total customer need for supporting technology.
In some areas of IT, components - typically at board level - can be multiply-sourced and simply integrated thanks to the existence of mature standard interfaces. This has produced healthily competitive environment where the customer enjoys increasing choice and value for money.
These benefits, however, patently are not available at higher levels of the IT hierarchy where standardisation is poor and components can only be integrated at a certain cost and wth some difficulty. As a result, customers are often locked in to solutions that tend to be monolithic, costly to assemble and, although they may be satisfactory at the outset, cannot adapt to changing business needs.
Object technology promises to ease this pain. It offers an approach that eases re-use and lends itself to standardisation. This technology, however, is as yet immature. The standardisation that would permit plug and play is advancing, but quite slowly and from the bottom up.
|
1 Background
The OMG has issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a Business Object
Facility that will provide a high-level integration environment over the
existing CORBA and CORBAfacilities specifications.
Business Objects are entities of software and information that implement
business concepts and entities in a way that is meaningful to business
people. As such, they are expected to have much a greater industrial
impact than the lower levels of "plumbing" that have so far emerged
from object orientation.
The success of these new specifications will be dependent on the
timely availability of implementations that prove the concept and deliver
value to the developer and user communities. It is important that this
process of building and proving does not take too long. OBOE will attempt
the maximum parallelism in development of compliant implementations.
2 Approach
- Methods/ methodologies
- Semantic Descriptions and Structures
- Abstraction technologies
- Version insensitivity and management
- Conformance testing
- Integration in existing infrastructure
- Object migration
3 Expected Impact
OBOE will assist user organisation Geco to increase competitive advantage
and achieve faster time to market for new services through the successful
exploitation of object technology. The project will also bring forward
the implementation of Business Object Facility products from technology
supplier Prism. In addition, the project will:
- Bring forward the practical availability of standards-compliant object
technology at the Business Object level by beginning to address the
challenges of conformance testing and interoperability assurance.
- Illustrate how "plug-and-play" can work at the Business Object level
- Illustrate how systems can be integrated at the Business Object level
- Offer a practical vision to OMG (and to POSC and others)
- Assist OMG and X/Open in their respective standardisation goals.
4 Exploitation of results
There are 3 principal pillars to the OBOE exploitation plan:
- Commercial products from two of the partners - these are
(and will be) the partners' flagship products, supported by a
substantial portion of their own marketing programs.
- A new Product Standard with "branding" program from X/Open
(this activity lies outside the project but follows on immediately
from the work done here).
- Dissemination of project results, leveraging OMG activities and
broadening support for OBOE throughout the OO community.
Fig. 2. Technical Architecture
The most obvious entities that fall outside the BOF platform are:
- Existing applications, typically mainframe-based, that remain in
active use
- Existing databases, typically relational
- Office desktop applications (Spreadsheets, Presentation Graphics etc.)
- Remote access devices
The last type will run on platforms that are evolving from today's
web browsers. Java support will be needed to facilitate interoperation
between these and BOF-based objects.
Among the BOF-based objects there will be a mixture of
application-specific, industry-specific and generalised services such
as Graphical Configuration and Workflow Support.
5 Summary of Results
The tangible results from the project will include:
- BOF implementations based on Newi and OpenBase
- A sophisticated and convincing user demonstration (based on Geco's
seismic application)
- A simpler "omnibus" demonstration
- Literature (both generic and specific to OpenBase and Newi)
- A set of reports
SEL, June 11, 1999
|
