According to New York City-based Information Builders Inc, the 1990s will be the era of information architecture. In other words information technology users will be working in a multi-vendor environment using common applications and common data, and will require an infrastructure of tools and services to fit in with this environment but which will also be compatible with existing systems as well as with new technology. Information Builders believes that IBM’s Systems Application Architecture is the best and most well-defined information architecture for this purpose, but thinks that IBM’s Repository probably won’t have built-in management and control tools to support multi-vendor environments. Consequently, this is the market that the company intends to go for throughout the decade. This means that its Focus will have to be more than a fourth generation language and will evolve into a complete tool for information management. Last month the company made two announcements that indicated that it was beefing up its Focus offering to meet this newly targeted market: firstly it integrated its Level 5 expert system with the Focus language to enable developers to write applications containing embedded knowledge. Secondly, Information Builders’ new 5.5 release of PC/Focus started shipping: the thing offers a database management system architecture called Direct/Connect between personal computers and mainframes. This latest release of PC/Focus fulfils Phase 1 of Information Builders’ long-term Focnet strategy to implement client-server co-operative processing unveiled last year in Cannes (CI No 1,300). Next year Focus procedures will be distributed and stored as executable objects and will be accessed via remote procedure calls for cross-machine object execution. Phase 3 of the strategy is on schedule for delivery in 1992 when Focus will be a completely interoperable system with applications being interoperable with servers, and will have universal communications support and system-wide data transparency. However, Information Builders’ head of marketing John Senor was at pains to explain that this will not be a true distributed database, merely distributed applications. He doesn’t think that IBM’s distributed database will arrive this century. As for other developments about to be launched on an unsuspecting world, Information Builders has just released its Level 5 Object product, taking Focus into the graphical user interface environment and offering portability across graphics environments. However, the company’s president Gerry Cohen is sceptical about the impact that graphical user interfaces will have, since he thinks that they are too complicated for databases to handle properly. Similarly, he doesn’t have too much time for object-oriented techniques, saying that while the press and theoreticians love them, he’s not so sure about users. He suggests half-teasingly that users can get a dosage of such techniques by using Level 5 Object which will tell you more than you ever want to know about using that particular paradigm. Focus will also be available on the AS/400 in June. Looking a little further ahead to the autumn, Information Builders will have Presentation Manager Focus available: this will use object-oriented techniques by applying the Focus language to discrete screen objects, thereby producing modular, reusable code. At the same time the company will introduce the Focus Application Creation Tool in a version which can be used to generate Focus code by picture programming. Katy Ring
