A large crack has appeared in IBM’s argument that AIX Unix and Systems Application Architecture will remain separate development environments – the crack comes courtesy of Marlow, Buckinghamshire-based Instrumatic Ltd which represents the US company and IBM Business Partner Cadre Corp in the UK and has announced Teamwork as the first complete set of analysis and design tools common to both IBM OS/2 and AIX workstations. Instrumatic UK’s marketing manager Richard Campbell explained that while a developer can take models developed under AIX and run them in the OS/2 environment, IBM hasn’t yet reconciled the differences between AD/Cycle and AIX software engineering, and a developer would probably use one route or the other. However, whichever route was chosen, the skill set required to use Teamwork would remain consistent, thus eliminating both the task duplication and risk formerly involved in developing along either route. In other words using Teamwork, a developer could write an application within the AIX environment that would run on an IBM mainframe and which would therefore ultimately be SAA-compliant. Yet Campbell prevaricated as to the implications this has for AIX and SAA, saying that if one rigorously upholds IBM’s definitions then a developer cannot create an SAA-compliant application on the RS/6000 because the AD/Cycle process has not been applied to AIX nor has the approach to the Repository been clarified for AIX. But he implied that these were conceptual problems and did not constitute a real-life programming dilemma. He thinks it likely that IBM will announce some association between the two environments in the near future. An IBM spokesman said that interoperabilty is the name of the game and added that IBM is obviously moving towards AIX being part of Systems Application Architecture.
