Standards Activity

Much work is taking place in the industry to develop standards in the areas of Java, business objects, and business object infrastructure. One area that is being explored is the relationship between Java and Object Request Brokers (ORBs) such as the standards defined by the Object Management Group (OMG). Another area that is being explored is the type of infrastructure that is required to support business objects in distributed computing environments. Work is also taking place to see if agreement can be reached on common definitions for some business objects.

The San Francisco project is participating in many of these discussions. We are working, along with other projects in IBM, to submit proposals to OMG in the areas of Business Object Facilities and Common Business Objects. Developing standards for the industry in these areas will help customers to be able to more easily combine software from several vendors into an integrated solution. It will also make it easier for application developers to learn to use distributed objects to build their next generation of products. However, the software vendors we are working with have told us that we should not wait for all of the standards questions to be answered. We are proceeding with building and deploying the frameworks even if standards have not been adapted in many areas.