http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/technol/ole/backgrnd.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)| Posted Date: February 21, 1996 |  Go To TechNet Home Page
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Rapid globalization, growth of the Internet and shifting economic conditions are creating the greatest challenge faced by both business and information technology (IT) professionals. The challenge is to make their systems or processes more adaptable to the dynamic business environment while leveraging existing system resources and investments. Today business enterprises have either inherited or created over time legacy systems that are difficult to maintain and operate; as a result these systems resist the rapid-pace of change they are required to adapt to. In response to this, businesses are asking their enterprise system vendors and their own internal information systems professionals to work together to create adaptable, highly functional, cost-effective, and reliable systems.
Microsoft and SOFTWARE AG have responded by signing an agreement to make "OLE Integration," the portion of OLE that integrates component-software (the non-Graphical User Interface (GUI) subset of OLE) available on most major industry platforms. As a result of this alliance SOFTWARE AG will:
This opportunity combines the enterprise skill of SOFTWARE AG with Microsoft's pervasiveness in business computing to create a new dimension in enterprise solutions.
Document ContentsMicrosoft was founded on the proposition that industry-standard computers are empowering tools that belong on every desk and in every home. Microsoft's charter has always been to create the software that delivers this vision. Leading thinkers in information systems have long believed that distributed, flexible client/server architectures address the information needs of the enterprise more powerfully than traditional computing models. For several years, Microsoft has focused on building the software to support distributed computing infrastructures. Additionally, Microsoft has designed its business system software to work on a broad range of platforms, increasing customers' platform options and thus fostering competition and driving down prices. Today, client/server architectures have become the mainstream solution for business needs, and Microsoft offers sophisticated yet easy-to-use software to support customers' client/server needs.
In today's dynamic business environment, organizations face pressures from shrinking margins, intensifying competition, industry consolidation, staff reductions, and escalating customer expectations. Executives and managers throughout industry are looking to achieve business advantage through better decisions, faster responses, improved communications, and smarter investments. Information technology can contribute to business advantage; hence, organizations are evaluating advanced information system solutions. In realizing this business advantage, managers face new challenges. Some of these are technical issues, such as integration, migration, network management, open standards and usability; others are management issues such as service and support.
Microsoft addresses the organization's information technology needs and challenges with a range of products, technologies, services and partnerships for business computing. Microsoft bases its approach on the concept of information networking. Beyond simple file and print sharing, information networking is the complete linking of users with information. Built on a unified client/server architecture and supporting open standards and universal connectivity, information networking is the foundation for a new generation of information applications. Built-in supportability makes the information network easier to manage; component-based software development provides a high-productivity approach to creating applications.
To support this approach and architecture, Microsoft applies the Information At Your Fingertips philosophy by offering a range of Windows(R) operating systems and the Microsoft(R) Office productivity suite. Microsoft products also meet the demands of distributed capabilities at the server level with the BackOffice(TM) family of server applications and development tools. Furthermore, Microsoft has used its OLE software component technology to integrate these platforms and applications. Looking ahead, Microsoft's product integration strategies, centered around OLE, enable customers to use the new Microsoft Exchange mail system, MSN(TM) - The Microsoft Network online services, and other new technologies that add exceptional value to customers' information systems. To support solutions based on these technologies, Microsoft's services include technical support, information services, and alliances with other companies to complete the range of service offerings, providing customers with choices and flexibility.
Document ContentsIn an industry known for rapid changes, SOFTWARE AG stands out as one of the computer industry's largest and most consistently successful software companies. It has evolved from a supplier of mainframe-based software to a company providing enterprise-wide client/server products based on industry standards. Its heritage in production-scale, mission-critical, computing gives SOFTWARE AG an advantage in today's market where most vendors proclaiming enterprise-wide solutions lack the essential enterprise experience and knowledge.
For the past 26 years, SOFTWARE AG has pioneered technological innovation. Since the release of ADABAS in 1969, followed by NATURAL ten years later, the company has won acclaim for its well-engineered products. However, though the face of information systems has changed, SOFTWARE AG has continued to evolve and now focuses on delivering investment-safe, distributed computing solutions for multi-platform environments. By emphasizing controlled migration to open systems and managed client/server computing, SOFTWARE AG allows users to fix what is wrong with their computing environments without losing what is right. Users gain flexibility and control to handle whatever is on the horizon -- from a changing business environment to emerging technologies. The company's goal is to create technology-based solutions and tools that help customers solve strategic business and information management problems.
Founded in Darmstadt, Germany in 1969, SOFTWARE AG has grown to 4,000+ employees serving 80 countries worldwide. An installed base of more than 5,200 satisfied corporate customers offers testament to SOFTWARE AG's strength in the marketplace. As a worldwide supplier of enterprise computing products and services, including extensive experience in mainframe and mid-range computers, middleware, database and software tools on all major operating systems, SOFTWARE AG offers a highly respected global consulting, systems integration and support organization.
SOFTWARE AG is dedicated to providing comprehensive IS solutions in an open client/server environment. The company focuses on several product families and programs: NATURAL for application engineering, ADABAS for data management, ENTIRE for multi-tier distributed computing solutions, and the Open Data Warehouse Program. Support for multiple operating environments ranging from the desktop to the mainframe, various DBMSs and a comprehensive set of protocols, is central to SOFTWARE AG's mission to provide organizations with enterprise-wide, customized business solutions.
Organizations are rapidly moving to distributed computing environments and must reconcile current mainframe-based legacy systems with new technology. SOFTWARE AG was one of the first software vendors to address this critical need. In 1990, the company formally introduced ENTIRE -- SOFTWARE AG's initiative for enabling Open Enterprise Computing. However, this did not happen overnight. Years of experience meeting the critical requirements of large-scale enterprise systems have lead to what is known as ENTIRE.
ENTIRE bridges the gap between the old and new worlds of computing. It allows companies to extend and evolve existing applications to newer and more cost-effective platforms, without sacrificing investment. SOFTWARE AG provides a smooth, risk-free migration path to the world of Open Enterprise Computing and is one of the few companies fully capable of delivering enterprise-scale computing in a distributed environment.
The ENTIRE distributed computing product family provides seamless integration of applications and data in a heterogeneous distributed environment. Its portability and interoperability capabilities offer "any-to-any" connectivity. With ENTIRE, users can start anywhere, build anywhere, deploy anywhere, and access data and applications from anywhere in the enterprise.
ENTIRE is composed of several families, addressing the core needs of enterprise scale distributed solutions. Each of the ENTIRE families are composed of individual products. The synergy of the products working together within one common architecture offers advantages, and the architecture encourages incorporation of products from a variety of providers. This allows ENTIRE to solve genuine customer problems in the real world, a world where rarely is a new system implemented in isolation from a history of previously acquired tools, databases, networks and operating systems. The product families focus on:
ENTIRE ACCESS, the SOFTWARE AG solution for database middleware, enables applications to operate transparently with multiple RDBMSs including Oracle(R), CA-Ingres, Sybase(R), Informix(R), DB2/x, ADABAS and others in both client/server and single platform environments. It is a 'virtual database' shielding developers from proprietary SQL interfaces.
ENTIRE BROKER, the SOFTWARE AG solution for distributed function middleware, provides a set of distributed application services enabling a variety of application designs based on messaging concepts. ENTIRE BROKER manages messages between clients and servers, message holding queues and other related resources for both client/server and peer-to-peer communication between distributed processes.
Another core function of ENTIRE BROKER is to manage replicated service providers and to identify an optimal instance of that service provider for an incoming request. This frees the programmer from explicitly dealing with threads in multithreaded environment situations, a complex and costly development activity that is unavoidable if an application is to scale to enterprise levels.
Both ENTIRE ACCESS and ENTIRE BROKER rely on ENTIRE NET-WORK, the communications backbone of SOFTWARE AG's middleware architecture. ENTIRE NET-WORK is a communications transport layer product line used for remote communications across heterogeneous networks. It shields the higher layer products from the API differences of many operating platforms and communication protocols. In addition, it provides relay node services and automatic protocol conversion.
Attendant services required for enterprise-scale OLTP in a distributed environment such as translation, directory, systems management and security are provided by the ENTIRE Services product line.
Document ContentsDuring the latter half of the 1980s, the spread of workgroup and departmental computing environments brought increased attention to the need for sharing data and services across computing environments. At the same time, the evolution of open systems concepts propelled distributed computing issues to the forefront of standardization efforts, displacing portability as the primary openness strategy. Today organizations with investments in heterogeneous hardware and software platforms are focusing on ways to achieve interoperability, among applications, tools, and services as a means of integrating enterprise computing resources.
Although the desktop has been a major catalyst in the move toward distributed computing, today's emphasis is on standards for multi-platform, multi-vendor interoperability. This reflects the practical need in most organizations to exploit an existing base of heterogeneous systems and to preserve investments in those systems while migrating to an open systems environment.
These circumstances are precisely the principles upon which SOFTWARE AG's and Microsoft's strategy rests. This strategy aims to extend the benefits of open systems to a wider range of users and computing environments, by providing a consistent distributed computing solution for both proprietary and open systems environments. This, in turn, provides a bridge for organizations seeking to move from traditional, non-distributed systems to tomorrow's that are both open and distributed.
Recognizing the need to respond to economic or competitive pressure ultimately forces an organization to seek new ways of addressing business realities. Often organizations have two choices, buy or build the solution. Today, SOFTWARE AG and Microsoft offer a third choice. An organization can now buy, build, or assemble the appropriate solution.
As the availability of OLE Integration spreads across all major enterprise platforms, the software industry will achieve a component market that provides higher rates of innovation, more specialized customer solutions, higher quality applications, and a faster, less expensive development process. Instead of building all components of a custom solution from scratch, corporate developers can purchase software components from specialized component vendors. For instance, they might buy a financial analysis component or a customer information component for use in a custom application. In the process, users of the application get a higher-quality product because the application incorporates best-of-breed components made by experts. Because corporate developers do not have to build each component from scratch, they can deliver the application in much less time and at a greatly reduced cost.
Furthermore, components can be built and reused by in-house organizations. This will support the decentralization of development, and the separation of technical skills, business expertise and the skill level required to create an application.
In addition, business applications assembled using OLE component integration software are more flexible. With modular software applications built using OLE, changing an application to meet new needs is easier because a new component from any vendor can be purchased and plugged into the application to extend its functionality. This makes system maintenance much easier and extends the life of the application.
Traditionally, software vendors have focused on certain segments of the user community. While some vendors have addressed the needs of the centralized IS organizations, other vendors have developed solutions for the needs driven by departments and end users. Today many vendors recognize that the best approach to satisfy the broad requirements of all segments is to form alliances with vendors that offer complementary expertise.
SOFTWARE AG is regarded as technically superior by customers and industry analysts for their support of "bet-your-business" production scale applications. SOFTWARE AG brings the experience and credibility to understand the enterprise scale computing business as a result of 26 years supporting mission-critical applications. SOFTWARE AG has a history of delivering solutions for analysis, design, development, deployment, training and services -- in any mixture required by the business needs.
The availability of Microsoft's OLE across platforms means that the industry's most successful component softwaremodel will now be an option for distributed heterogeneous environments. By combining the complementary expertise of SOFTWARE AG and Microsoft, Network OLE will become a solution for all communities within an enterprise. This solution offers all the advantages end users require on their desktop, like ease-of-use and rapid application development through componentware, while at the same time it satisfies the rigorous requirements of mission-critical applications, like security, availability, reliability, and enterprise-wide scalability.
Document ContentsSoftware AG's products are briefly discussed below.
SOFTWARE AG's objective is to be one of the industry leaders as both a provider of standard components and technology that enables customers and partners to develop their own components.
NATURAL is evolving into a tool that enables the efficient production of componentized solutions. To achieve this, SOFTWARE AG will continue to develop NATURAL to support Network OLE and to become a fully component-based application engineering environment.
One of the reasons why NATURAL had been invented was the need for interactive development. It overcomes the cumbersome compile and link process that is required with 3GLs. Component-based middleware adds another annoying step to the development process: the IDL compiler. After a program has been modified to use some additional services, the IDL must be compiled to generate stubs, and the program has to be re-linked to include these stubs.
This would not be acceptable to an application programmer using NATURAL. SOFTWARE AG will incorporate support for Network OLE in a way that makes these steps transparent to the application programmer in order to continue the paradigm of interactive development.
The investment of SOFTWARE AG's customers in existing NATURAL applications has to be protected. This will be achieved through middleware technology, that provides wrapper capabilities for the existing NATURAL applications. For example, NATURAL RPC based applications will become accessible as OLE Automation servers for Windows-based client applications.
Not only does this approach protect the investment in these applications, at the same time it provides a migration strategy and a near term solution, before full capabilities can be delivered both through NATURAL and Network OLE across a variety of platforms.
Whenever new technologies are introduced in heterogeneous environments, companies face two important challenges:
One of the major areas of use for component technology is the integration of legacy applications into new reusable business components. This allows end user companies to protect their investment by making these services available to new applications across the enterprise. In the same context, application vendors can enhance existing products to participate as service components in a distributed, component software framework.
Developers of traditional solutions are typically well trained and experienced in their specific area of knowledge. For them it is of major importance to have productivity tools that allows them to rapidly create the component interfaces without being forced to learn all the details of the sophisticated component layers. They typically want to solve their problems without having to learn a new programming paradigm.
In most large enterprise, various styles of distributed computing have been deployed over time in different parts of the organization. Examples are RPC technology, LU6.2 to connect to mainframe environments, and more recently messaging products have been utilized. Since it is hardly possible to mandate one of these technologies as a standard throughout the enterprise without a long-term migration plan, it will be necessary to have appropriate bridging capabilities in place.
The integration of Network OLE and ENTIRE will provide a solution for these challenges.
OLE Automation allows applications to make interfaces available to the outside world. In the opposite direction, applications are able to use these interfaces to control other applications. The main objective is to render the independent components of the applications programmable, so that they can be reused.
The advantage of this technology is that application services in the server area can be made available as objects both to the standard applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Novell WordPerfect, etc., and to custom applications in the front office. As far as the end user is concerned, all the services - whether local or remote - appear via a standardized, component-based interface. Simple and rapid development of desktop client applications that can integrate with back end server applications will be enabled, if server applications across the enterprise will adhere to the OLE/COM specification.
SOFTWARE AG will provide a tool-set, as part of its ENTIRE middleware, to create an easy-to-use integration framework to wrap existing legacy applications into the COM technology. Based on service descriptions (e.g., interface definitions), the tool set will automatically generate the wrapper for the server application and the proxy objects that the client will use. The ENTIRE Broker will be a key element of this framework, since it already supports various types of distributed computing styles, like messaging, RPC, and LU6.2. It will provide a bridge between these paradigms and component-based middleware. In combination with the wrapper tools, it can meet all challenges integrating the new and the legacy.
Document ContentsOrganizations implementing desktop solutions can take advantage of OLE integration today. In order to ensure that an application can be combined and interoperate with other OLE-enabled components, customers should make sure that they purchase software supporting the OLE standard.
Customers should identify which legacy systems could be transformed into reusable business components through wrapper technologies. A comprehensive analysis process should be developed that addresses issues like the degree of modularity, programmable APIs, flow and dependencies of the business logic, etc. A middleware architecture should be deployed now, that provides capabilities to integrate traditional communication styles with wrapper tools for building components. In many cases this approach should not be viewed as a short-term migration path, but rather as a long-term strategy to capitalize on previous investments.
Many companies are already changing their development methodologies in order to adopt component-based concepts. It is important not to focus on the mechanics of tools like object-oriented programming languages, but rather educate developers in "component software thinking" rather than "object thinking." This ensures a running start to embrace a component architecture and to take advantage of the new buy, build, and assemble paradigm.
The consulting organizations within Microsoft and SOFTWARE AG, together with selected partners, can provide assistance through all phases of this process, that are necessary to fully exploit these new technologies.
Document ContentsToday the computer hardware industry has a set of standards like OLE that specify interfaces for all of the various computer hardware components. But until now, there has been no framework for software components to work together in a standardized fashion. OLE is an interface standard for integrating software.
OLE allows independent software vendors to build specialized software components that interface in a common way with other software components. OLE is also a standard for integrating data. By using the standard OLE interfaces, software vendors can create their own innovative, unique, and value-added components that can plug into other vendors' components. The different software vendors do not even need to communicate with each other to exchange specifications or in any way coordinate the design and assembly of their specialized software components. They just need to build components that adhere to the OLE interface standards.
The idea behind a common and transparent integration standard is that any business solution that understands the interface, and has permission, can use it. This concept is key to the future of client/server computing, as well as, the development and proliferation of components. If client/server computing is to be successful, it must have better and faster ways of enabling business solutions. A business application should be able to incorporate any available business object it needs to provide the necessary functionality and business rules. Programming is in the process of changing drastically. As use of component interfaces becomes standard operating procedure and many more components become available, solution builders will worry less about issues such as memory management and graphics generation and more about solving business problems. They simply will engage the components and services needed to complete the business task at hand.
Development languages are changing to support this new concept and to provide easy ways to assemble business solutions together from a combination of commercial and custom-developed components. The fundamental enabling technology for these interfaces is OLE. OLE components encapsulate functionality and provide entry points to the functionality through open OLE-based interfaces. This allows access to the component from within any OLE-enabled language. Developers at all experience levels therefore can choose the tools most appropriate for them, yet all can share the same set of reusable components.
Rapidly responding to the demands of a business is necessary in today's dynamic environment. For IS to meet these demands it must incorporate a standard interface that supplies the following benefits:
Common integration standards must provide a means of expressing new or enhanced capabilities to potential clients in a standard fashion. A well-designed traditional service architecture and its API may provide the notion of different levels of service. (The Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard from Microsoft is an example.) Applications can count on the minimum level of service, and can determine at run-time if the provider supports higher levels of service.
An integration standard should provide the capabilities to minimize or avoid negative impact when services are revised and new versions are introduced. The problem with versioning is one of representing capabilities (what a piece of code can do) and identity (what a piece of code is). A later version of code, such as "code_version_2" indicates that it is like "code_version_1" but different in some way. The problem with traditional versioning is that it's difficult for code to indicate exactly how it's different from a previous version and worse yet, for clients of that code to react appropriately to new versions. The versioning problem is reasonably managed in a traditional system when there is only a single provider of a certain kind of service. However in a multi-vendor system with ever-changing service providers the task can be difficult if not impossible unless they share a common interface.
Using a common integration standard enforces the merits of componentization and modularity in application design to improve programmer productivity and organizational responsiveness. As application complexity continues to increase, it becomes more difficult to extend functionality. Monolithic applications are popular because it is safer and easier to collect all interdependent services and the code that uses those services into one package. Interoperability between applications suffers accordingly, where monolithic applications are loath to allow external agents to access their functionality. Because end users demand interoperability, however, applications are compelled to attempt interoperability, but this leads directly back to the problem of application complexity, completing a circle of problems that limit the progress of software development.
Across application, machine, and network boundaries there are certain elements that must be transparent to programmers to guarantee productivity yet provide the infrastructure required for components to communicate. Connection, function invocation, interface negotiation, feature evolution, character translation, and other services, required to facilitate communication of components across complex heterogeneous environments, must be supported by the common integration standard. These services should not have to be a concern to the business application developer, nor that of the component developer.
Providing a common integration standard allows programmers leverage their learning. New services are exposed through new interfaces and once programmers learn how to deal with these interfaces they already know how to deal with new services created in the future. This is a great improvement over environments where each service is exposed in a completely different fashion.
A common integration standard allows application designers focus on designing the solution. In designing an application, the designers can spend their time in the essence of the design--the contracts between the parties--without having to think about the underlying communication mechanisms for any interoperability scenario. Network OLE provides those mechanisms automatically and transparently.
Document ContentsOne topic that deserves elaboration is the distinction between Network OLE, which is the focus of this agreement, and Microsoft Visual Basic(R) Remote Automation.
Visual Basic programming system 4.0 Enterprise Edition introduces Remote Automation, a new Visual Basic feature that provides the capability to develop distributed client/server applications that communicate via the interfaces of OLE Automation. Remote Automation delivers network access to OLE Automation servers today; however, it is a subset of the enterprise-scaleable architecture that Network OLE will provide. Remote Automation provides network access for OLE Automation; Network OLE will provide network access for all the OLE Integration interfaces, including custom interfaces. In the future, Remote Automation will be subsumed by Network OLE, which will then be used to support customer's Remote Automation applications.
Remote Automation allows client applications to communicate with OLE server applications running on the Windows 95 and Windows NT(TM) operating system, provided that the client/server communication is confined to the set of OLE Automation interfaces. Remote Automation accomplishes this by introducing two new components: the Automation Proxy and the Automation Manager. The Automation Proxy resides on the client platform and replaces the normal OLE Proxy that an Automation client uses in a single machine situation. The Automation Manager resides on the server platform and relays requests from the Automation Proxy on the client machine to the appropriate Automation stub and Automation server on the server machine. Working together, the Automation Proxy and the Automation Manager hide the "remoteness" of client-server communication; the Automation client and server act just as they would in a single machine scenario.
Visual Basic 4.0 also includes two tools: the Remote Automation Connection Manager, and the Component Manager. The Connection Manager provides server-side security (data authentication and access control), and allows a developer to switch the designation of an Automation server from local to remote, a useful feature in development and testing scenarios. The Component Manager is used to catalog, locate, and utilize reusable OLE components throughout an enterprise network.
Remote Automation in Visual Basic 4.0 enables developers to write distributed client/server applications based on OLE Automation today. Because Remote Automation is specific to Visual Basic, OLE Automation, Windows 95 and Windows NT, it is not appropriate for developing broad-reaching, cross-platform solutions.
Remote Automation is specific to Visual Basic, Windows 95, and Windows NT. Network OLE, and the SOFTWARE AG ports will enable developers to create cross-platform distributed solutions that incorporate desktops, mainframes, new business components and legacy applications. Remote Automation provides real, but limited, benefit to corporate developers today; that investment will be subsumed and protected by Network OLE, which will provide a more far-reaching and enterprise-scaleable architecture.
Microsoft and SOFTWARE AG have recognized the market demand for Network OLE on a variety of Enterprise computing platforms, including those which house the vast array of existing "legacy" applications. Our joint effort will enable enterprise solutions to be constructed using OLE as the single component integration technology. Remote Automation offers a compelling reason to develop distributed client/server solutions today and extend them across different platforms as Network OLE becomes available.
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation and SOFTWARE AG on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft and SOFTWARE AG must respond to changing market conditions it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft or SOFTWARE AG, and Microsoft or SOFTWARE AG cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This Document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT AND SOFTWARE AG MAKE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.
SOFTWARE AG, the SOFTWARE AG logo, NATURAL, NATURAL CONSTRUCT, PREDICT, ENTIRE and ADABAS are trademarks or registered trademarks of SOFTWARE AG.
Microsoft, BackOffice, MSN, Visual Basic, Windows, and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, in the U.S. and/or other countries.
All other brand or product names are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
(C)1995 Microsoft Corporation and Software AG. All rights reserved.
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