Although protagonists from both Unix industry camps have long maintained – ever since distributed computing became a mainstream political fruit – that the two opposing implementations of Remote Procedure Call technology, from Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co-Apollo are unlikely to be reconciled, Unix International Inc says that what it calls the Intermediate Definition Language, IDL, part of Atlas, will serve both causes. By writing to the Intermediate Langauge, rather than a specific RPC, Unix International says, developers will be able to run their applications across networks using either set of protocols. Unix International president Peter Cunningham stressed that the Intermediate Language is not an application programming interface as such, but more like Groupe Bull SA’s CM-API protocol manager, part of the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment. Both current applications written to Sun’s RPC, and future Distributed Computing Environment applications based on the Apollo implementation, will be able to take advantage of it, he said. Atlas also provides a migration path to future object-oriented technology – it includes Tivoli Systems Inc’s object-based distributed systems management framework, again a component of the Distributed Management Environment. Atlas will also encompass DOMF, the Distributed Object Management Framework being developed by Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. It manages the distribution of objects across networks, and has also been endorsed by the Object Management Group, which will use DOMF, integrated with a range of other object technologies, as the basis of its Object Request Broker, which it hopes will become the standard for interconnecting heterogeneous object-oriented environments. Atlas will be compatible with OMG by 1993, said Cunningham, as well as X/Open’s prospective object management standard, XOM. Other technologies that Unix Labs will release for Atlas include seven-layer, X400 and X500 Open Systems Interconnection services being developed in conjunction with Retix Inc; an enhanced version of SunSoft’s Network File System; and a global Network Information Service naming system, also from SunSoft. It is not yet clear how the integration of this plethora of technology will pan out: release schedules offered are phased stages through 1992 and 1993, though Cunningham says 35% of the work has already been completed, 35% will be delivered in the 1992-93 time frame, and a further 30%, at the application tools level, has yet to be done. The availability of all of these depends on Unix International being able to agree acceptable pricing and licensing terms with the firms and organisations involved. Atlas-compliant reference technologies – the first 35% – that are, or will become available from Unix System Labs this year, include the enhanced security and multi-processing versions of Unix – System V.4.1 ES and System V.4.2 MP, the latter available in the fourth quarter – the Tuxedo System/T transaction processing monitor, Unix Labs’ existing OSI and Network File System file management services, C++ and Locus Computing Corp’s personal computer-to-Unix integration tool. All interface specifications for Atlas components will be available from Unix International, and Atlas, though it is optimised run under Unix, could also be made to fit other environments, Cunningham says.
