A. O'Toole
IONA Technologies

Making Software Work Together is the key challenge of today's IT environment. The ability to build across platform, language and network boundaries offers more powerful, flexible applications. Creating cohesion from diversity allows developers to choose best-of-breed components and adopt an evolutionary approach to the adoption of new technologies.

Making software work together requires an underlying infrastructure to standardize and simplify the process of application integration - either through the use of a software bus or a container component architecture. This infrastructure is the middleware - the defining feature of today's software systems.

Middleware began with the mainframe, and the industry trend towards the thin client is leading us back towards the world of MVS and 3270. Now the industry requires 'CICS for the network' - a container for network-based applications - an open, cross-platform and cross-language solution that provides the global plumbing behind today's distributed systems.

There are three key pieces to such a solution - platform, services and component framework. Detailing each of these gives us an insight into the shape of future applications and the pivotal role that middleware plays in providing additional functionality over and above it's function as the 'glue' within the system.

Biography: Annraí O'Toole co-founded IONA and has served as a director since its inception. Mr. O'Toole has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer since, April 1992. From 1987 to April 1992, Mr. O'Toole was a research assistant in the Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin.

Appears: Before Session 1 (Workflow), Wednesday AM.

J. Sventek
Hewlett Packard Labs

Past and current research into middleware has resulted in a variety of Object Request Brokers (ORBs), whether CORBA compliant or not. These products/packages are typically designed as a "one-size-fits-all". In reality, customers desire a high degree of customization (along different qualities of service) when embedding such middleware into a distributed solution. This talk will present the notion of an ORB framework, the invariants that all elaborations of the framework must meet, and the potential degrees of freedom that can be provided by particular elaborations.

Biography: Joe Sventek is HP's Laboratory Scientist for Distributed and Object-Oriented Computing. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California. Prior to his current position, he led the distributed systems group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, lectured in the Computer Science department of the University of California, led the ANSAware implementation team, and served as the lead architect for HP's Distributed Computing Program. He represented HP in OMG's CORBA specification activity. His current research interests include publish/subscribe mechanisms, federated services, and middleware frameworks. In his spare time he trains for and competes in triathlons, skydives, skis, plays french horn, and sings with classical choral groups.

Appears: Before Session 4 (ORB Engineering), Thursday AM.