KN2

Keynote

Wednesday 0900-1000

Middleware and tools for building object-oriented applications

Donald Ferguson

IBM T J Watson Research Center and IBM Software Solutions Division

A multitude of business pressures are driving enterprises to reengineer their business processes and develop new systems using distributed object-oriented programming models and technology. This session describes the results and trends that have been observed working with many large enterprises over the past four years, and explains the pressures that drive them towards the use of object technology. Most, if not all, of these enterprises are developing a similar enterprise infrastructure and application model for deployment of their new object-oriented applications. The session describes the important requirements and resulting architecture components, and explores significant patterns in the architecture.

Most early customer and software vendor projects have sadly had to focus on the production of application development tools and the run-time 'middleware' needed to support the business objects they wish to develop. This session uses IBM's Component Broker as an example of a set of tools and run-time subsystems that enable greater focus on business logic and application development through use of vendor-supplied middleware and supporting application development tools. The session identifies the critically required functions and capabilities (such as workload management, integration with legacy applications, transactions, security, and queries) and explains how these can be provided in an OMG/CORBA-based environment.

The session also discusses the next set of major challenges that need to be met by object-technology middleware providers to continue the trend towards enabling programmers to specify what their application should do and develop only the necessary business logic.

Key topics

Sample business problems, incremental business process re engineering, operational reuse

Elements of middleware: AD tools and programming model, run-time systems, system management

Programming model: application and process objects, composite business objects, basic business objects, data and state objects, adapter/interceptor patterns for providing object services and runtime support without affecting business-object source code

Integration with the legacy: accessing legacy data, operationally reusing legacy applications and transaction programs, technical challenges and some solutions

Examples of import run-time functions: single system image and workload/availability management, how to implement a single-level store programming model over multiple, heterogeneous back-ends

Object services: security, transactions, other

Future directions

Donald Ferguson joined IBM as a Research Staff Member in 1987, and is currently a second-line manager in the distributed systems and transactions department. He is also Chief Architect and Technical Leader for IBM's Component Broker product and Enterprise Java Beans implementations.

During his career in IBM, Dr Ferguson has contributed to IBM cache management, operating system and transaction processing workload management, multimedia content server, system management, and distributed object oriented products. He is an author of 7 current or pending patents and over two dozen technical publications. Dr Ferguson has received two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, four Research Division Technical Awards, two IBM Invention Plateau Awards, an IEEE best paper award, and was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1997.