From Software Futures, a sister publication

One thing the software world is not short of is CORBA-compliant Object Request Brokers. At last count, there were at least nine significant players. Software Futures asked ICL what makes its DAIS ORB special enough to stand out from the crowd.

By Clare Haney

Standards are all very well, but they’re not a whole lot of good if no one’s really using them in anger. This is a criticism that can still, with some validity, be leveled against the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture. Sure, some brave souls are piloting CORBA applications – but where are the true apps based on the standard? Well, $4bn International Computers Limited (ICL), UK subsidiary of Japanese computer conglomerate Fujitsu, has got news for you! The company was able to introduce us to two significant organizations – the UK Home Office and mobile phone services provider Vodafone – which are using its CORBA-compliant DAIS (Distributed Application Integration System) ORB in just such high level and vital applications. Before we investigate these apps, let’s take a look at DAIS itself, version 3.0 of which is set to ship next month. ICL effectively relaunched DAIS last July with the announcement that it was to invest a further $46.5m into development of the ORB and other object projects, lumping them together in its newly established UK-based Object Software Laboratories. It probably appeared like that, replies Colin Stretch, DAIS marketing manager. In those two years we’ve been building up our customer base and our products. We’ve spent a lot of time with the OMG and have been working very hard on transaction management and security. ICL contends that its DAIS front-end is the most CORBA- compliant of all ORBs because you don’t need a special implementation of DAIS to be able to run CORBA tools, such as Platinum Technology’s ObjectPro. However, the back-end object services you’ll find in the current flavor of the ORB, version 2.1, are based not on CORBA, but on Open Distributed Processing (ODP), another standard as defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and CCIT. Stretch reckons the ODP services are superior to the CORBA ones. ODP services are far more elegant and attuned for commercially viable systems than some of the CORBA services, he says. With the OMG’s move to be more commercially-oriented, the body is taking on board some ODP services and incorporating them into CORBA. At the same time, ICL’s rapidly moving to compliance with CORBA Object Services. In fact, DAIS 3.0 will offer both ODP (also known as DAIS) and CORBA Object Services. While DAIS 2.1 conforms to CORBA 1.2, DAIS 3.0 will be CORBA 2.0 compliant. So what’s ICL’s view on CORBA? We believe in CORBA, answers Stretch. It holds a great deal of promise. It should become the printed circuit board of the software industry. When everyone agrees to it, distributed systems problems will go away. Like other OMG members, ICL envisages an ideal world where Microsoft’s OLE inhabits the desktop, while CORBA is the standard for enterprise-wide computing. They’re the two major architectures, therefore they’ll have to live with each other. It’s relatively easy to integrate CORBA with OLE; it’s the general mechanism to do it that people are fretting over. That’ll be resolved over the next year, he says optimistically. Network OLE won’t be available for another two years. Meantime there’s an opportunity for CORBA to steal a march, since it works on PCs and Unix now. DAIS itself already runs on a variety of platforms including all flavors of Windows, SCO Unix, OS/2 Warp, Solaris, HP-UX, DEC Alpha and naturally ICL DRS 6000. Support should be forthcoming for AS/4000, MVS, RS/6000, Macintosh and Sequent Symmetry 5000 among others. How does ICL differentiate DAIS from the ORB pack? The main difference, according to Stretch, is that DAIS generates C and therefore can not only talk to C++, but also to tools like Visual Basic and Gupta’s SQLWindows. The company states that other ORBs w

ith C++ or OO language binding can only talk to C++ with ease. It chose C because that’s what the OMG defined its first IDL (Interface Definition Language) with. ICL is promising to implement a C++ binding and is looking at Smalltalk. But higher on its agenda than Smalltalk is the more standard MIS language Cobol, and it’s currently in talks with Cobol provider Micro Focus about how to integrate the two.

What can DAIS offer?

So what can DAIS offer you, the corporate software developer? Well, it supports multithreading, even on Windows 3.1, which primarily means improved performance through using the network far more effectively. It also supports network optimization, which sometimes involves slowing the network down to a speed that the server can accept, avoiding holdups that occur if the network speed is too fast. DAIS can not only search for objects by name, but also by type and property. Stretch claims that the software’s Extended Object Manager does away with the problem of object leakage whereby users create and then forget to delete objects. Instead, objects can be set to delete after a timeout period. ICL’s largest CORBA application is the UK Home Office Immigration Service’s Suspect Index System (SIS) for Immigration Control which is accessed by more than 1,000 users. The company claims that this is the first and largest mission-critical CORBA-based application in the world. As Stretch puts it, The Home Office system is the UK’s first line of national security. You can’t get more mission-critical than that.

Largest CORBA-based application

Ken Richardson, assistant director, immigration service (enforcement) for the UK Home Office, explains what the system is all about. The Suspect Index is a list of people whom it is essential to identify before leave to enter the UK is granted. It is routinely checked before admitting a non-European Economic Area national. Estimates put the number of non-EEA foreign nationals arriving in the UK every year at around 10 million. Before the system came in, an immigration officer would have to refer to a 300-page book. The ICL system it uses now is based on two central DRS 6000 Unix Servers running the company’s High Availability Manager. They support a master and mirror image of an Oracle database which holds around 400,000 entries on suspect persons. Immigration officers can check passports against the database, either by scanning machine readable passports or typing in an individual’s name. The search takes less than a second. Should they require further information, they then can search an image database from a back office terminal to display typed and handwritten documents and photos. ICL used DAIS to handle all movement of images and data across the network, thereby reducing standard application development times by nearly a quarter. To prove this is pretty complex stuff, There are an impressive 450 CORBA interfaces in the system. The Suspect Index System went into operation in January 1995 at 70 UK points of entry, including Heathrow and Gatwick airports, the Channel Tunnel and the port of Dover. Statistics taken after the system was in operation for six months make impressive reading. There have been no total system outages, while 6 million passports have been scanned and over 10,000 images have been downloaded. The Oracle database is 4Gb, while the image database is 7.8Gb containing 263,000 images. Download time is 12 seconds, something ICL’s Stretch is particularly proud of. Using a conventional TCP/IP network, it would have taken 40 seconds. We screwed that down to 12 seconds by using DAIS, because ORBs know how to manage networks.

Vodafone has chosen

Another DAIS user is international provider of mobile telecommunications services Vodafone, also based in the UK. For the six months ending 30 September 1995, the company had a turnover of 1032m and an operating profit of 310m. Two years ago, Vodafone begun looking at creating a new architecture for its service provision systems. We have a complete range of h

ardware including ICL mainframes, HP Unix boxes, DEC VAX and Alphas and PCs. We wanted something to bind it all together, project manager John Douglass explains. To that end, the company investigated ORBs, 4GLs, DCE and porting existing software to different platforms. DCE didn’t really appeal. Back in 1994 the DCE story was a bit sparse, he adds. It wasn’t on all platforms. While it did have the security, transaction processing and networking capabilities we were interested in, you had to take the whole lot at once. The OMG’s CORBA pick’n’mix approach where, for example, if you want transaction processing, you can add it in later, seemed a better way forward for us. So, Vodafone went to its main hardware suppliers and asked them what tools they could provide to help build its new architecture. This request netted Digital’s ObjectBroker ORB, some Oracle solutions, 4GL offerings from Hewlett-Packard and ICL’s DAIS. After a quick scan of the software on offer, Douglass and his team put forward a proposal to use ObjectBroker, because it was better integrated with the desktop than DAIS. But their proposal was rejected in favor of ICL’s ORB. It was a political decision because we didn’t want to close the door on our ICL mainframe. We wanted to have the option to integrate it later on. We haven’t done that yet, but it’s still an option, says Douglass. Once it had spent the next six months working with ICL staff, Vodafone gained a lot more confidence in the product and has since rolled out the first phase of its DAIS implementation project.

VSS2

Vodalink Server System 2 (VSS2) is an application programming interface which allows the company’s service providers to integrate with Vodafone’s subscriber administration service system. The network provider has two phone networks, one digital and the other analog, each of which have their own subscriber administration system. Vodafone itself sells airtime to these organizations which then connect customers up to either network using the system. The idea was to simplify the front-end presented to Vodafone’s service providers. Over the years both these systems have been redeveloped and have diverged slightly. We’re trying to bring them back into line and to have a single front-end onto both systems. That will allow us to redevelop the two back-end systems in our own time without affecting end users, states Douglass. DAIS is being used in the context of VSS2 as a basic communications package to distribute applications running on the two subscriber administration systems. Vodafone has put the DAIS interface onto two legacy VAX system front-ends, using the ORB’s communications and distribution mechanism. These systems running Rdb and flat-file databases front-end the network and wholesale billing system which run on the ICL mainframe. They are accessed by at least 400 concurrent users. ICL itself uses the ORB in at least eight of its software products. These include an enterprise workflow system, Role Model and a distributed multidatabase system, DAIS Information System. There’s also OMNIA Banking Frame, a retail banking application and design automation systems, VISE and SuperVISE, where DAIS is integrated with Visix Software’s Galaxy cross-system application environment. ICL won’t reveal how much money it’s making from DAIS, only saying it’s on target. It claims it has over 100 sites for the software. For the moment, it’s concentrating on building up a US presence, expecting to announce significant partnerships shortly to help establish channels to market. It has a couple of US DAIS users already, but no one in the Home Office/Vodafone league, as yet. From what we’ve seen, DAIS would appear to be ahead of the ORB pack by virtue of some real life users and all the extra good stuff it offers on top of its CORBA compliancy. The real question is how badly ICL wants to be in this market and what it’s prepared to do to get itself noticed. The tagline for DAIS is The ORB for commercial applications, and Stretch describes it as CORBA with attitude. It probably

needs a few more big users under its belt and some more marketing muscle before it attracts sufficient attention, but ICL is making the right moves to make that tagline ring true.