S. Crawley, K. Raymond and S. McBride
Cooperative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC), Australia

The management of meta-information, e.g. database schemas, interface types, programming types, is relevant to every flavour of middleware including CORBA, DCE and DCOM. The Meta-Object Facility (MOF) is an open, standards-based tool for meta-information management. It has a semantically well-founded meta-information model, and a standardised mapping to CORBA IDL which enables automatic generation of interoperable and portable meta-information services.

The MOF can be viewed as the heart of a typical CORBA based distributed system. Examples of its usage include:

software development: the MOF can be used as the meta-information repository for a software development environment

type management: the MOF can be used to manage various kinds of type information required by a distributed system. For example, the MOF could be used to implement a "super" CORBA Interface Repository with extra operations for updating CORBA interface definitions and for relating them to other kinds of types. Similarly, the MOF could be used to build a CORBA-based type manager for the binding and behaviour types that underpin the RM-ODP model of complex bindings.

information management: the MOF can be used to implement repositories for data models and database schemas in an information management system.

This tutorial presents the need for meta-information management and introduces the MOF along with the tools and areas of application associated with it.

Appears: Tuesday PM

J. De Meer and A. Hakim
GMD-Fokus, Germany / UoWestern Ontario, Canada

Quality of Service (QoS) is a property that consists of a set of quality requirements on the collective behaviour of the system entities (or objects) that compose the enterprise (or system or application...) under consideration. QoS is a crucial element in the success or failure (or the perception of success/failure) of a system. For example, systems that produce correct results outside of a given deadline can, in certain cases, be as bad as systems that produce incorrect results within some deadline.

Achieving a given level of QoS when developing a system is not something that can be done as an add-on when the system has already been developed. Rather, QoS has to be considered at all stages of the system development. This tutorial focuses on this "enterprise-wide" consideration of QoS. An introduction to the general issues associated with QoS are given along with an overview of how formality can facilitate the development of QoS dependent systems. The tutorial also provides information on the current ITU-T and ISO QoS standardisation activities.

Appears: Tuesday PM

K. Duddy
Cooperative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC), Australia

The Java programming language is emerging as an important environment for developing Internet-based applications. Java provides the ability to develop secure, platform-independent programs which can be packaged as applets and downloaded from an Internet web server to execute within the context of a standard web browser. However, in order to be truly useful, the applet must then be able to communicate back to the corporate network thus facilitating access to corporate databases, transaction monitors and legacy systems.

The Object Management Group (OMG) is an industry consortium which has defined an architecture for an Object Request Broker (ORB) or Software Bus, called CORBA, which permits objects to interoperate independent of the hardware platform, operating system and language in which they are written and deployed. Many major system vendors now support ORBs on a wide variety of platforms and languages.

An important new development in this area is the introduction of ORBs for the Java language. The coming together of these technologies will open the world of corporate information to browser-hosted Java applets and facilitate the development and deployment of Internet-based and enterprise-wide applications.

Participants in this course will gain an understanding of CORBA and Java ORBs, enabling them to make decisions about development of Java ORB technology.

Appears: Tuesday AM

I. Simmonds
IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA

(replacing the previously advertised speaker H. Kilov of Merrill Lynch, USA)

This tutorial is about precise specifications of business rules. Applications should be written to do precisely what the business wants them to do, i.e. that support business rules as defined by business domain experts. To achieve this, "what the business needs" should be specified precisely and explicitly. Understanding and explicitly specifying customer requirements is the most important aspect of solving business problems. The goal is to solve business problems rather than to produce code.

This tutorial provides and is based on real-life experience, not artificial examples or trying to prove a point. The tutorial shows how to:

understand businesses (including business rules) independently of any information systems used for their automation

express this understanding in clear, precise and complete business specifications to be used by both business domain experts and software developers

reuse concepts and constructs (patterns) common to all business specifications, in order to save intellectual effort, time and money

elicit business requirements as a result of dialogues with customers, and how to separate concerns using viewpoints

transform business specifications into various business designs, including the role of workflow, and how business specifications support business transformation

transform business specifications and business designs into various information system (software) designs and implementations

Appears: Tuesday AM