CHAPTER 12
The Future Of Database Management—Object Technology

Many organizations recognize the importance of standards in the emerging area of object-oriented systems development. In the spring of 1992, the Object Management Group (OMG), a nonprofit corporation dedicated to developing object standards, published the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard for object-oriented development. CORBA was developed jointly by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, NCR, and HyperDesk Corporation. CORBA creates a standard protocol for an object to place requests and receive responses from other objects. It is interesting to note that these competing vendors—all with vested interests in proprietary software—have agreed to adhere to the CORBA standard in the development of new object-oriented systems.

Most of the major distributed operating systems state that they adhere to the CORBA. Consequently, an understanding of the foundation architecture for distributed systems is critical. The following text is selected from the Object Management Architecture Guide (1993) and is reproduced with the permission of the Object Management Group.

Chris Stone, President and CEO of the Object Management Group, states:

The OMG’s goal is to get everybody to agree on a messaging format and how objects talk to each other; get them to agree to the language and a model of how to structure the data; get them to agree to some common interfaces; get them to agree on how to do security and containment....The real significance of the CORBA specification is for application developers who want to build new client/server applications that will work across disparate platforms.

Twin business pressures of decentralization and globalization prompted technology to come to the rescue in the form of the personal computer and desktop computing. All information of a business, however, was distributed throughout the many computing resources of the business.

Software provides these major hurdles: time to develop software, maintenance and enhancement of software, the limits on program complexity for profitable software sales, and time required to learn and use the software. These hurdles herald the major issues facing corporate information systems today: the quality, cost, and lack of interoperability of software. Hardware costs are plummeting, but software costs are rising.

The Object Management Group formed to help reduce complexity, lower costs, and hasten the introduction of new software applications. OMG has plans to accomplish this through the introduction of an architectural framework with supporting detailed interface specifications. These specifications drive the industry towards interoperable, reusable, portable software components based on standard object-oriented interfaces.

The mission of OMG is as follows:

•  OMG is dedicated to maximizing the portability, reusability, and interoperability of software. OMG is the leading worldwide organization dedicated to producing the framework and specifications for commercially available object-oriented environments.

•  The Object Management Group provides a Reference Architecture with terms and definitions upon which all specifications are based. OMG will create industry standards for commercially available object-oriented systems by focusing on Distributed Applications, Distributed Services, and Common Facilities.

•  OMG provides an open forum for industry discussion, education, and promotion of OMG-endorsed object technology. OMG coordinates its activities with related organizations and acts as a technology/marketing center for object-oriented software.

•  OMG defines the object management paradigm as the ability to encapsulate data and methods for software development. This models the “real world” through representation of program components called “objects.” This representation results in faster application development, easier maintenance, reduced program complexity and reusable components. A central benefit of an object-oriented system is its ability to grow in functionality through the extension of existing components and the addition of new objects to the system.

OMG envisions a day when users of software start up applications as they start up their cars, with no more concern about the underlying structure of the objects they manipulate than the driver has about the molecular construction of gasoline.

The members of the Object Management Groups, Inc. (OMG) have a shared goal of developing and using integrated software systems. These systems are built using a methodology that supports modular production of software; encouraging reuse of code; allowing useful integration across lines of developers, operating systems, and hardware; and enhancing long-range maintenance of that code. Members of OMG believe that the object-oriented approach to software construction best supports their goals.

Object orientation, both at the programming language and applications environment levels, provides a terrific boost in programmer productivity, and greatly lends itself to the production of integrated software systems. Not necessarily promoting faster programming, object technology allows constructing more with less code. This is partly due to the naturalness of the approach, and to its rigorous requirement for interface specification. Only a set of standard interfaces for interoperable software components is missing.

The Benefits Of Object Management

As mentioned in the previous section, the technological approach of object technology (or object-orientated technology) was chosen by OMG member companies—not for their own sake, but to attain a set of end-user goals. End users benefit in four ways from the object-oriented approach to application construction.

An object-oriented user interface offers many advantages over more traditional user interfaces. In an object-oriented interface, applications objects (computer-simulated representations of real-world objects) are presented to end users as objects that can be manipulated in a manner similar to real-world objects. Examples of such object-oriented interfaces can be seen in systems such as Xerox Star, Apple Macintosh, NeXT Computer’s NEXTSTEP, OSF Motif, HP NewWave, and to a limited degree, Microsoft Windows. CAD systems represent another good example of design components that can be manipulated in a way similar to that of real components. The end result is a reduced learning curve with a common look and feel to multiple applications. After all, “seeing and pointing” is much easier than “remembering and typing.”