OMG Adds Fault Tolerance For CORBA Applications Extends CORBA Support Into Vertical Industries

Business Wire, Jan 27, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 27, 2000

The Object Management Group (OMG) recently concluded its Technical Meeting week in Mesa, AZ, USA, sponsored by Computer Associates International. The highlight of this meeting was the adoption of specification standardizing fault tolerance, fail-over and recovery within CORBA-based applications. In addition, the OMG issued a Request for Proposal for Surveillance Interfaces for Air Traffic Control systems, and evaluated 23 responses to a UML Request for Information which will lead to a major 2.0 release of the specification next year.

The 5-day, OMG meeting attracted over 400 member representatives and their guests who met to work on approximately 90 technology adoptions in process. Current OMG work in process will extend existing Object Management Architecture specifications including the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and generate industry specific interfaces and extensions effecting a wide range of industries from life sciences, manufacturing, and utilities, to transportation, finance and health care.

Platform Technology Committee (PTC) Actions

The Platform Technology Committee (PTC), responsible for the OMG's CORBA infrastructure, voted to adopt a specification for a Fault Tolerant CORBA architecture (orbos/2000-01-19 &orbos/2000-01-23) that standardizes control over fault management, including the management of replicas and automatic switching of services from failing components to replicated components. Fault tolerant functionality is an essential part of the computing infrastructure in industries that rely on applications to be available &uot;24 x 7&uot; (24 hours a day, seven days a week) without interruption regardless of power failures, system crashes, and other types of incidents. Examples include utilities applications for power plant service management, financial stock trading applications, news and media delivery such as video and on-line news dissemination, and government national security applications.

The PTC also adopted a Portable Interceptors specification (orbos/1999-12-02, orbos/1999-12-03, orbos/1999-12-14, &orbos/2000-01-01). Specialized services, such as security, intercept CORBA invocations in order to apply access conditions; development tools including debuggers and monitors also use interceptors to add their functionality to an ORB execution environment.By standardizing the functionality and interfaces of interceptors, OMG members enable development of ORB-independent add-on tools from third-party vendors.

One more new service, enhancing and refining the representation of time in CORBA systems, was also adopted. All of these specifications will become official OMG technologies pending approval by the PTC in these votes and final approval by the Board of Directors in March 2000. Finally, the PTC issued a Request for Proposal initiating the adoption process for one new technology, XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) production of XML Schemas (ad/2000-01-04). This RFP will extend the XMI specification to allow users to continue to use XML DTDs as well as emerging XML schemas from the W3C. The end result will be additional interfaces to aid developers integrating metadata with distributed computing and development environments, the Internet, data warehousing and knowledge management applications.

Domain Technology Committee Actions

The Domain Technology Committee (DTC) develops specifications for technologies specific to vertical markets. At this meeting, the DTC started a final vote on a new specification for Management of Event Domains (telecom/2000-01-01, telecom/2000-01-02, telecom/2000-01-03, &ab/2000-01-05) from the Telecom Domain Task Force.

In addition, the DTC issued a Request for Information (RFI) to guide future standards work in the area of Traffic Center Management for intelligent highway systems in the transportation industry (transprt/2000-01-01), and issued four Requests for Proposals initiating work on new specifications: a Surveillance RFP in the area of Air Traffic Control (transprt/2000-01-09), a Workflow Resource Assignment Interfaces RFP (bom/2000-01-03), and an Electronic Commerce Registration and Discovery Service (ec/2000-01-05). Finally, the DTC issued an RFP to define Revision 2.0 of the Product Data Management Enablers specification (mfg/2000-01-02).

For complete descriptions of these technologies, and to download copies of the specifications, see http://www.omg.org/techprocess/meetings/schedule/adopt.html. Please submit any questions additional questions regarding OMG's technologies to info@omg.org and they will be directed to the appropriate staff or member expert.

About The OMG

With the support of its membership of software vendors, software developers and end users, the OMG's CORBA is &uot;The Middleware That's Everywhere(TM)&uot;. Since 1989, the OMG has been &uot;Setting The Standards For Distributed Computing(TM)&uot; through its mission to promote the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems. The goal is to provide a common architectural framework for object oriented applications based on widely available interface specifications.