The Distributed Systems Section (DSS) of the Computing Facilities Branch is pursuing a long-term investigation of scientific and administrative applications of object technology, such as object-oriented analysis, design, and programming, object-oriented user interfaces, object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS), and object-based distributed computing systems. This project is a continuation and extension of our previous work, begun as part of the Advanced Laboratory Workstation (ALW) Project, on object-oriented programming in C++, the OI user interface toolkit and builder, the ObjectStore OODBMS, and of our interest in emerging distributed system standards, such as the OSF Distributed Management Environment (DME) and the Object Management Group's (OMG) Object Management Architecture (OMA) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). In FY94, we completed and deployed for beta test the first version of xemt, our first major C++ software application to use the OI user interface toolkit and builder. Xemt provides a graphical user interface to the Environment Maintenance Tool (EMT), which manages applications software for the Advanced Laboratory Workstation (ALW) system. This enables application maintainers and developers to more easily manage their own software collections, and to integrate them into the ALW environment. Unfortunately, upgrading to AFS 3.3 caused EMT to no longer work, so xemt cannot be used until the maintainers of EMT correct the incompatibility. We have procured JAM, an object-oriented 4GL, and have begun using it to develop a business system to support ALW hardware and software maintenance. We have also purchased several leading C++ class libraries to support C++ development as alternatives to the NIH Class Library, which we no longer have the resources to maintain. Finally, we continued our membership in the Object Management Group (OMG), an industry organization dedicated to producing a framework and specifications for commercially available object-oriented environments.
