Canadian commands and utilities house Mortice Kern Systems Inc brought an early version of a new applications programming interface testing and checking technology to UniForum last month, showing the thing off under wraps to selected independent software vendors and end users. When it comes to market in the summer, the software, codenamed Espresso, will break apart an independent software vendor or user’s code and compare its application programming interfaces against any given set of operating system interfaces to determine what additional calls the application requires to get it transfered to the target environment. The first obvious targets for the technology are independent software vendors that want to evaluate what Spec 1170 compliance they have in their applications so they can create implementations that can be moved to multiple Spec 1170-compliant operating systems, Unix or otherwise. Mortice Kern says the technology will also test applications against any other applications programming interface sets, which are plugged into Espresso in a common database format, including Windows NT, Windows, Macintosh and OS/2. The company does not have fully documented application programming interface sets for all of these – though it is eyeing the APIW effort – but says applications can be tested for headers and other general operating system features to show where, and how much conversion work will be involved. Mortice Kern’s product will be the first commercial implementation of TenDRA technology developed by the UK Defence Research Agency and licensed to the company on a non-exclusive basis. TenDRA was first chosen by the Open Software Foundation for its over-ambitious Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format Request For Technology in May 1992, a project that was scaled back in subsequent revisions until it was shelved altogether. The technology then dropped into the European Commission-X/Open Co Ltd Deploy initiative backed by several European independent software vendors to create a comprehensive and robust set of application programming interface conversion and testing tools. The implementation of Spec 1170 across a range of Unix and non-Unix environments has provided the financial lure for the company to take TenDRA to market.
Espresso
Based on initial feedback from Mortice Kern, the UK defence agency has added hooks in the TenDRA it has supplied to the company for generating various kinds of status reports describing programming interface activity and enabling lists of programming interfaces to be plugged in using a standard database mechanism. The company, which would not let us play around with what it had of Espresso up on a SparcBook, will put the software onto Unix systems to start with.
