Marking a change in the way that it delivers the specifications for its Portability Guide, standards body X/Open Co Ltd has released advance details about some of the technology guidelines that will, and are likely to be included in the next – XPG4 release of its Common Applications Environment, giving developers and manufacturers a chance to track X/Open’s open systems environment in their technology. There are three early release categories ranging from the low-level, through preliminary stages that acknowledge and address emerging technology, to fully drafted specifications which will be included in XPG4 as they stand now. At the lowest level, the group has published a comparison study of Open Systems International profiles, trends and developments. There are two preliminary technology investigation documents. The first is an XA specification for distributed transaction processing, the second describes a byte stream file transfer mechanism which provides a command line interface to the Open Systems Interconnection File Transfer Access and Management service, based on the widely used ftp commands. Drafted specifications to be included in XPG4 are protocols for integrating personal computers into an XPG-compliant network – PC NFS – and an extension to the XPG3 indexed sequential access method which includes transaction management facilities. X/Open says it now intends to release advance specifications on a regular basis, and said that more details will be available before the end of the year.
Amdahl Corp has duly announced that it hasbecome a full corporate member of X/Open. At the same time, the group has added five major US and European corporations and government agencies to its user council: they are Boeing Computer Services, the US Department of Agriculture-Farmers’ Home Administration, the US Treasury Department, the Swedish Televerket Telecom Group and Union Bank of Switzerland.
