SCIENCE

NEEDHAM, MA -- The Object Management Group(TM)'s (OMG) latest Technical Meeting Week, sponsored by IONA, attracted about 600 OMG members and guests to Danvers, MA, USA, north of Boston, where they advanced the organization's standards efforts and participated in other related activities. At this meeting, OMG members moved to adopt the Model Driven Architecture (MDA(TM)) as the group's base architecture in which future standards will be defined. In the MDA, a specification starts out as a Platform-Independent Model (PIM) defined in UML; from it, MDA-based development tools produce platform-specific models and implementation definitions on multiple platforms. This allows MDA to support application portability and interoperability across a wide range of middleware platforms, and extends OMG's reach beyond CORBA to such platforms as Enterprise Javabeans (EJB), XML/SOAP, .Net, and others. MDA business benefits include: -- Full support throughout the application life-cycle -- Reduced costs from beginning to end -- Reduced development time for new applications -- Best possible representation of business rules, the foundation of every application -- Scalability, robustness, security, implemented in the best possible manner -- Stable, model-based approach extends usable application lifetime and thereby maximizes ROI from software investment -- Smooth integration across middleware platform boundaries -- Rapid inclusion of emerging technologies into existing systems New OMG Specifications OMG members completed technical work on seven new specifications. Two of these new specifications come from OMG's Domain Technology Committee (DTC), which defines computing standards for specific industries. The DTC defined a Computer Aided Design (CAD) Services standard for manufacturing, and a set of Laboratory Equipment Control interfaces. Spearheaded by OMG's Life Science Research Domain Task Force, the Laboratory Equipment Control interfaces will be useful in laboratories everywhere. OMG's Platform Technology Committee (PTC) adopts infrastructure and modeling specifications. It is standardizing an extension to CORBA for load-balanced processing in data parallel programs, a dynamic scheduling service for Realtime processing, and a multicast protocol for delivery of events in distributed systems. CORBA security, already well developed, gets a new standard for Security Domain Membership, and the OMG's modeling specification suite adds a metamodel and UML profile for Software Process Engineering. All OMG specifications may be downloaded without cost from the organization's website at these URLs: New Standards Efforts Initiated OMG members initiate a new technology adoption by issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP), stating requirements and deadlines. In Danvers, OMG members issued four new RFPs: The DTC issued one RFP, which will standardize Telemetric and Command Data handling for space and ground-based systems. The PTC issued two RFPs that will enhance CORBA: One, coming out of the Telecommunications Domain Task Force, will define interworking between the CORBA Notification Service and the Java Messaging Service (JMS); the other will update the mapping to the well-established language C to include valuetypes and other recently-added enhancements. A third PTC RFP will define a UML profile supporting software testing, allowing this important capability to be defined into an application at the model level. For additional information visit www.omg.org