The Constituency Building Project for the Diffusion of ANDF

ANDF/DEPLOY - 8912

Keywords ANDF technology, Standardisation, Conformance testing

Start Date: Dec 93 / Duration: 36 months

[ contact / participants ]

Objectives

The overall objective of this project is to bring the ANDF technology to the marketplace and assure its broad adoption amongst the major systems vendors and ISV's. Therefore, a number of different actions will be undertaken to maximise the likelihood of success by exploiting the different characteristics of the involved partners.

The envisaged actions include:

Requirements Gathering

Investigate market requirements both at a strategic and an implementation level. Understand to the greatest extent possible what it will take for this approach to achieve widespread adoption. Identify and prioritise the APIs which need to be supported.

Development

Develop the API headers and other supporting information needed by application developers. Demonstrate the viability of ANDF as a commercial porting tool and distribution method by porting major UNIX products from European software companies using ANDF technology. Investigate and exploit development by X/Open to take advantage of testing and validation activities currently ongoing with support of MITI (Japan).

Standardisation

This should follow the classical steps for fast-track (pre-)standardisation of APIs that have been proven within X/Open:

• Complete the documentation of all necessary interfaces;
• Gain consensus across a high proportion of major suppliers to the interface definitions and, as far as possible, to supporting them with products;
• Publish the material for general use (X/Open uses more than one stage as a method of filtering out any residual defects or ambiguities from the specifications);
• Submit the final specifications to formal standards bodies.

Conformance Testing

• Evaluate how test systems will need to evolve to accommodate the ANDF environment.
• Develop technologies to accelerate development of tests for more APIs. A study of existing technologies is the first step, followed by integrating the best techniques to optimise test productivity in the future.
• Develop tools for application testing (static as a minimum, dynamic if possible); once again, multiple technologies exist and a selection and integration process is appropriate.

Awareness/Education

Within the scope of this project it is only possible to begin the job of creating awareness; the following are designed to establish market momentum:

• Mount demonstrations to promote credibility of the process to developers;
• Document a number of case studies that illustrate real cost savings in the porting of well recognised applications;
• Develop a porting guide to assist developers in getting results;
• Develop a set of educational materials to provide developers with in-depth awareness;

Further information about ANDF/DEPLOY is available from the ANDF/DEPLOY home page.

CONTACT POINT

Mr Gianluigi Castelli
ETNOTEAM S.p.A.
Via Adelaide Bono Cairoli, 34
I-20127 MILANO
tel: + 39 / 2-261-621
fax: + 39 / 2-261-10755

Participants

ETNOTEAM S.p.A. - I - C
DEFENCE RESEARCH AGENCY - UK - P
OSF-RI - F - P
ET INTERNATIONAL - B - P
UNIX SYSTEM LABORATORIES - UK - A
X/OPEN - UK - A
SOFTWARE AG - D - P

ANDF/DEPLOY - 8912, December 1993

please address enquiries to the ESPRIT Information Desk

html version of synopsis by Nick Cook