OMG Internet SIG -- Minutes of Meeting #16 (original) (raw)

OMG Internet Platform Special Interest Group

February 9, 1998

Salt Lake City, Utah

OMG document internet/98-02-01

OMG Internet Platform SIG homepage: http://www.objs.com/isig/home.htm

Agenda

Participants

OMG-DARPA Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures, Craig Thompson, OBJS

The OMG-DARPA Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures was held in Monterey, California, on 6-8 January, 1998. The homepage for the workshop is http://www.objs.com/workshops/ws9801/index.html. The list of 100+ participants, 90+ workshop position papers, and the workshop report are available from the workshop homepage. The workshop focused on

Brainstorming on OMG Relationship to Java

We continued a discussion started at the OMG Internet SIG meeting in East Brunswick (see past discussion) on whether and how to make OMG more Java-friendly. Our motivations were that OMG and Java will increasingly overlap in turf as Java is used for enterprise, middleware, server, and distributed applications, and that it seems in both groups' interests, and definitely in the interests of customers if the two camps tend toward convergence and not divergence.

Near the beginning of the discussion, we also noted that there may be a need to make OMG more web/XML friendly but then limited discussion to Java friendliness. From the last meeting's discussion, we listed these thoughts:

Brainstorming on Web-ORB Integration Architectures and Data Models

Thompson started the brainstorming by asking if there is an ideal integration of ORB technology and Web technology so we can "have our cake and eat it too" and avoid having both communities re-invent each other's wheels as the Web increasingly adds enterprise middleware services to its list of architectural standards. He then broke the general problem into two subproblems:

Browser

DOM/XML, HTML, PS, �

TCWA

HTTP*

|

HTTP*

TCWA

DOM

Server

Bill mentioned that a feasibility study will be complete in June and that W3C members can critique the work in progress.

We discussed some places where web and ORB architectures overlap beyond the basic architecture and object model listed above. One of these was RDF versus MOF, which uses UML. In addition, Bill Janssen mentioned some projects he'd like to see someone in Internet SIG take on:

Work Session on OTAM, Mike Bigrigg, CMU

OTAM is a proposed information access facility (composed of services) based loosely on ISO FTAM. It consists of a virtual file system that provides an interface to a collection of physical file stores and database records. A Trader stores the file and database schemas plus potentially more (e.g., data conversions). This is an attempt to objectify file systems so CORBA can operate on them. FTAM can be viewed as a file system adapter.

Mike Bigrigg (CMU) led this discussion. He said the initial goal is an OTAM White Paper (initial draft by Shel Sutton at the East Brunswick meeting) followed by an OTAM RFP.

As envisioned, OTAM sits in front of plug-in file systems Unix, NFS, AFS, Win NT, others. It provides a standard interface across all these.

Internally, OTAM seems like it would depend on a number of CORBAservices and capabilities:

Collaboration Working Group, Henry Rothkopf, MITRE

Henry Rothkoph (MITRE) is interested in building support for an Internet SIG Working Group on Collaboration. He is generally interested in a variety of application domains like healthcare and C4I where people perform a variety of tasks accessing a variety of data sources, with changes over time to both the task mix and data sources needed. We discussed the need for

Next steps are to continue to build interest in a Collaboration Working Group at OMG Manchester then to invite several speakers to OMG Orlando to talk about aspects of collaborative workspaces. Action item: Henry to invite to Orlando 4-6 speakers at 20-30 minutes each, plus a one hour discussion, 2-3 hours in all.