CORDIS Archive

ANDF/DEPLOY (8912)

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. The same information will inform developers of Installers and system software components.

Demonstrate the viability

Demonstrate 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

Test tools exist for a number of APIs and more are under development. However, these are based on C source tests rather than ANDF. Work will therefore be needed to adapt these tools so that they can perform their present functions in an ANDF environment. This should not result in separate tools but multi-role tools. Testing activities within this project will therefore principally consist of the integration of test tools and test suite generation technologies that exist for the chosen APIs and for ANDF. In view of the high cost of test suite development, the project will focus on tools to accelerate test tool development rather than simply producing more API tests. The project will:

• 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;
• Mount a series of pilot seminars based on these materials;
• To contain costs, advertisements and mailings will be avoided except in connection with the seminars.

Start date: December 1993
End date: December 1996

Project Coordinator:

ETNOTEAM (Italy)

Partners:

ETNOTEAM (Italy)
DEFENCE RESEARCH AGENCY (United Kingdom)
OSF-RI (France)
Etnoteam INTERNATIONAL (Belgium)
UNIX SYSTEM LABORATORIES (United Kingdom)
X/OPEN (United Kingdom)
SOFTWARE AG (Germany)