The Object Management Group says that by far the most important work completed at its meet in Dublin last week was the adoption of the Unified Modeling Language – the first international standard for methodology and notation! OMG says. Meantime, the DCOM-to-Corba interworking specification (actually COM-Corba Part B to give its official characterization) that was passed by OMG’s platform technology group at its meeting in Dublin last week will become an OMG Corba spec once the OMG board votes on it at its February 1998 meeting at Novell Inc’s place in Provo, Utah, the company that former OMG chairman Chris Stone is now with. The single DCOM-to-Corba spec, designed to enable interworking between software components created using Microsoft Corp Distributed COM and OMG Corba-based technologies, was blended from more than one original submissions. We’re told ideas from Hewlett-Packard Co’s Microsoft-oriented submission were added to the other submissions from groups including BEA Systems, DEC, Expersoft, Fujitsu, Genesis, IBM, ICL, Iona, Novell, SNI, Visigenic and Visual Edge. HP provided comments and suggestions to the draft. They say Microsoft’s revised COM+ architecture doesn’t Corba 2.0’s Part A COM-toCorba interworking requirement and that in any case COM+ won’t be available until after the DCOM-endowed NT 5.0. DCOM interworking plus Java-to-IDL mapping and the delayed asynchronous messaging extensions to Corba should make it into Corba 2.2 (OMG just published 2.1). Corba 3.0 is still on-track, for the first quarter of 1998. Its core is a Java-educated component model environment.
