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 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 FY93, we began developing xemt, our first major software application to use the OI user interface toolkit and builder. Xemt will provide a graphical user interface to the Environment Maintenance Tool (EMT), which manages applications software for the Advanced Laboratory Workstation (ALW) system. this will enable application maintainers and developers to more easily manager their own software collections, and integrate them into the ALW environment. Xemt is written in C++. We also joined the Object Management Group (OMG), an industry organization dedicated to producing a framework and specifications for commercially available object-oriented environments.
