âHeterogeneous Development Environments Overviewâ, James Cusick ... Cross-platform development tools now commonly allow a single code base to support ...
AT&T Middleware Day & Software Symposium Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, October 24-26, 1995
Heterogeneous Development Environments: Session Overview James Cusick Member of Technical Staff jcusickcomputerorg AT&T Bell Laboratories AT&T Network Services Division 480 Red Hill Road Rm. 2E-030 Middletown, NJ 07748
SPEAKERS:
“Heterogeneous Development Environments Overview”, James Cusick “Porting the UNIX System to Windows NT”, David Korn. “Supporting a UNIX Application Under Windows: An Innovative Approach”, Randy Ringeisen and Brad Frohock. “Robust Process Automation in a Heterogenous Environment”, Joe Lennert, Rowena Mahaney, Janet Noun, David Robbins, and Lori Thorson.
SESSION CHAIR:
James Cusick
1. OVERVIEW AT&T software developers today build applications on diverse hardware using multiple operating systems, protocols, languages, and tools. AT&T’s computing environment standards point to a continued spread of such solutions especially with the advent of the AT&T Foundation Architecture. This session, entitled “Heterogeneous Development Environments”, intends to shed light on the issues of developing software for the non-homogeneous computing environments found within AT&T by spotlighting several success stories in this arena. Talks in this session cover detailed tool porting issues, innovative GUI application mapping between platforms, and sophisticated automatic configuration management approach in support of a large telecommunications platform.
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AT&T Middleware Day & Software Symposium Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, October 24-26, 1995
2. BACKGROUND Recently development environments have witnessed a dizzying explosion in complexity, diversity, and functionality. Early development environments were tied to specific platforms and were offered by the hardware vendors themselves. In the past when you bought a vendor’s equipment you would most likely develop under the operating system supplied using the languages, compilers, editors, debuggers, and shell environments found onboard the system. Today development environments come in a spectral explosion of platform independent, feature rich flavors. Cross-platform development tools now commonly allow a single code base to support Motif, Windows, and MAC environments. Commercially available class libraries encapsulate fundamental computing tasks on any platform. Even Microsoft has helped by finally adopting TCP/IP, opening the way for a normalization of communications between UNIX systems and PCs. Clearly, developers needing to provide solutions for mixed environments have many more choices than even a decade ago. Nevertheless, development in a heterogeneous environment continues to offer challenges in terms of word size differences, divergent or non-existing operating system services, and even competing or confusing nomenclatures. The talks in today’s session will attempt to underline some of these difficulties and the real world solutions AT&T engineers have created and deployed in response.
3. TODAY’S TALKS To illustrate the richness of the current state of heterogeneous development environments, the trusty ksh can be found on UNIX, DOS, Windows, and NT. This session is fortunate to include a talk by the creator of the Korn Shell, David Korn. Dave will present to us his experiences in porting UNIX tools to the NT and Windows 95 environment. He will discuss both the technical approach taken and the tools used to smooth out the porting task. Having the ksh on any platform certainly helps but many other problems come up when integrating multiple environments. This is especially difficult when supporting legacy systems that need to provide access from new platforms with which they were never designed to inter-operate. Randy Ringeisen and Brad Frohock of NSD will share with us experiences in evolving an X based GUI interface to an MS Windows front-end. Leveraging a well partitioned architecture we will see how a mapping of calls to the existing services of the legacy application speeded the evolution. Finally, International 5E project member Joe Lennert will share the complexities of managing the creation, distribution, and installation of releases across a wide-area and between several types of machines. Anyone having attempted multi-platform builds or code updates will appreciate the sophistication employed by this team in solving this critical component of developing in a heterogeneous environment.
4. CONCLUSION I hope this session will help point to a future of cooperation among computing environments. The spice of life is said to be variety. To use that spice to the competitive advantage of AT&T’s future products and services (and not to allow it to clutter the arteries of our long distance pipes) should be our clarion call.
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