Minutes of Meeting #4
Brisbane, Australia
March 4, 1996
Agenda
Attendees
W3C/OMG Workshop
Presentations
Mission Statement
Web + CORBA Integration Architectures
Tom Mowbray acted as meeting chair for ISIG co-chairs Shel Sutton
and Craig Thompson. Dan Chang took minutes; Thompson transcribed
Chang's draft minutes from meeting notes.
OMG members wishing to be members of the ISIG email list (internet@omg.org)
should send email to request@omg.org.
- David Berkowitz - CI Labs - david@cilabs.org
- Dan Chang - IBM - dtchang@vnet.ibm.com
- Keith Duddy - DSTC - dud@dstc.edu.au
- Vladimir Estivilt-Castro - QUT - vladeicis@qut.edu.ca
- Scott Foshee - BAH - foshee_scott@bah.com
- Junji Fukuzawa - Hitachi Ltd. - j-tukuza@sdl.hitachi.co.jp
- Dave Gamble - Micro Focus - davg@mfltd.co.uk
- Iver band - HP -iband@cup.hp.com
- Chris Kobryn - SHL - ckobryn@acm.org
- Lament LeBoucher - CNET France Telecom - lebouche@issy.cnct.fr
- Melfyn Lloyd - DSTC - melfyn@dstc.edu
- Mike Meyer - IBM - msmeier@vnet.ibm.com
- Greg Newman - Oracle - gsnewman@us.oracle.com
- Bob Pottervdd - HP - b_pottervdd@fc.hp.com
- Morris Rashad - DSI Pty Ltd - morris.rashad@datacraft.com
- Mark Robeau - L&G
- Jim Rye - Digital - rye @coyes.enet.dec.com
- Masayoshi Shimumura - Fujitsu - shima@rp.open.cs.fujitsu.co.jp
- Ute Schurfeld - IBM - schuerfe@vnet.ibm.com
- Roland Seidel - Telstra - r.seidl@tre.oz.au
- Kent Steflen - Anderson Consulting - ksteflen@ac.com
- Hiroki Tanaka - NIT - h-tanaka@?
- Michael Tao - SGI - tao@sgi.com
- Richard Thomas QUT - richard@fit.qut.edu.au
- Don Vines - IBM - dvines@austin.ibm.com
- Keith Wescourt - Tandem - wescourt_keith@tandem.com
- Geoff Wheeler - Telstra - g.wheeler@trl.oz.au
- Pete Young - BT - pyoung@srd.bt.co.uk
Tom Mowbray announced that the Joint W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed
Objects and Mobile Code will take place in Boston, Massachusetts,
on June 24-25, 1996. Its home page is http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/OOP/9606_Workshop/.
That page now contains the accepted position papers.
Greg Newman (Chair, Interactive Multimedia and Commerce SIG) gave
an overview of ODA (Object Definition Alliance) and its merge
with OMG.
Keith Duddy (DSTC) gave an overview of CORBAnet. The focus is
on IIOP interoperability. The current setup is: GUI - HTTP Server/CGI/ORB
client - ORB server. The future setup is: GUI/ORB client (applet)
- ORB server
ISIG worked on its Mission Statement. At a high level, its mission
was summarized as:
- Promote industry-wide adoption of OMG-specified technologies
within Internet-based distributed applications.
It combined the Charter and Mission, removed the first two paragraphs
of background information from its earlier charter, and drafted
the revised Mission Statement below. Action for Chair: verify
liaison list with Jon Siegel (OMG Liaison Subcommittee chair).
Anderson Consulting motioned to vote. Tandem seconded. The motion
passed to recommend the mission statement to the OMG Platform
Task Force (PTF) for adoption.
The revised Mission Statement follows:
"The mission of the OMG Internet Special
Interest Group (ISIP) is to recommend development work needed
to better align the OMG's Object Management Architecture (OMA)
with the Internet, World Wide Web, and various Internet tools
and facilities. It is intended to bring the potential of enhanced
interoperability, reusability, application portability, etc. to
the Internet based on OMG technologies. At the same time, the
ISIG will bring challenges to the OMG from the Internet community
in areas such as scalability, security, and mechanisms to make
OMG technologies pervasive. This potential synergy can best be
realized through cooperative efforts of the OMG, the Internet
Society, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and others.
The Internet SIG shall:
- Provide a focal point for interested parties to come together
to pool experience on the use of OMG technologies in Internet
settings.
- Identify a collection of ways that OMG and Internet architectures
can interoperate. Specifically:
- Identify standards for interoperability using OMG adopted
distributed object technologies and object services over the Internet.
- Promote the use of Internet tools that are based on OMG distributed
object technologies.
- Provide recommendations to the OMG TC, OMG Task Forces (TFs),
OMG SIGs, the OMG Liaison Subcommittee, and others as to how Internet
interoperability standards may affect OMG standards and adopted
technologies.
- Investigate extensions to the OMG object management architecture
(OMA) to facilitate Internet interoperability.
- Work through the OMG Liaison Subcommittee to help provide
a liaison, coordinating OMG with Internet based activities such
as the Internet Society (including its component organizations:
the Internet Activities Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF)); the Digital Library Forum (DLF); the W3 Consortium
(W3C); projects within the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA); the National Industrial Information Infrastructure
Protocols Consortium (NIIIP); and other industry efforts working
on both Internet and OMG technologies."
The next question, What is the problem we are trying to solve?
This broke down into other questions:
What major applications do we see for the Internet?
- information retrieval
- development of commerce (corporate and domestic) - requires
security and privacy …
- virtual private networks - How can telco's and other service
providers provide network management capabilities to customers?
One way is via formal object models like GDMO, SMI-ASA that underly
current network management. A question remaining is, will the
implementation of CORBA technology provide a smoother transition
to this service because it provides an underlying object model?
Why integrate CORBA and Web? Answers:
- because it is there (critical mass)
- universal client (browser) provides access to any existing/legacy
services including CORBA-based services
- WWW needs help from middleware to provide scalability, performance,
…
- WWW needs access to and invocation of well-defined components
(packaging)
ISIG worked on models for integrating Web with CORBA
- (current) Web client - Web server/CGI/CORBA client - CORBA
server ILU
- (current) Web client/applet/socket - CORBA client - CORBA
server
- (future) Web client/applet/CORBA client - CORBA server
- Web client/applet/Java client - Java server/CORBA client -
CORBA server