As expected, standards body X/Open Co Ltd, based in Reading, Berkshire, is now shipping its VSX4 test suite. Products complying with this will receive X/Open Portability Guide 4 branding, the Guide being X/Open’s specification for open systems. Developed by Unisoft Ltd, based in London, VSX4 incorporates nearly 2,000 extra tests and over 200 extra lines of code. It is now fully aligned with Posix 1003.1 1990 and has development capability for the federal FIPS151-2 extensions. Also provided are testing for multi-lingual capabilities and wide character support. VSX4 runs under the Open Software Foundation-Unix International Inc test-case harness – Test Environment Toolkit – which attempts to provide an industry-agreed common test environment for systems and conformance testing. In the first quarter of next year, XPG3 mode will be added to enable the transition from VSX3 to VSX4. X/Open will also publish its Management Protocols Applications Programming Interface which provides access to Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP, and Common Management Information Protocol, CMIP, standards. The programming interface enables applications to be migrated between them and for objects to be managed on remote systems. The specification is expected to become part of the Omnipoint initiative, a distributed management protocol co-ordinated by the Network Management Forum.
