Abstract

Software developers face significant challenges as they attempt to modernize their current application suites to take advantage of the benefits of distributed objects. The cost of architecting and building their next generation of applications as industrial strength distributed object solutions will be prohibitive for many software vendors because their skills are in developing procedural applications. Some of these vendors have indicated that as much as eighty percent of their development cost is spent writing and supporting the basic, noncompetitive functions that are essentially the same for any application solution offered in a specific domain.

IBM's San Francisco project addresses these problems by providing application developers with a base set of object oriented infrastructure and application logic which can be expanded and enhanced by each developer in the areas where they chose to provide competitive differentiation. The Business Process Components, which use the Java^TM language, are intended to lower the barriers to widespread commercial implementation of distributed object solutions. This report provides an overview of the San Francisco project and the business frameworks which are being developed. It is intended to provide the reader with a high level understanding of the architecture and content of the frameworks.