UniForum '95 Holds Full Slate for Applications Developers

Lively sessions planned on three-tiered architectures, portability

Application developers will be presented with a full slate of sessions tailored to their interests at UniForum '95, scheduled for Mar. 12-16 in Dallas, Texas. The following are key sessions in the track titled "Developing Applications for Open Systems":

• "Designing for Modular Portability" will be chaired by Heinz Lycklama, president of Open Systems Technology Associates, and include three end-user panelists. "Initially I labeled the panel 'Using second generation client/server tools to develop applications for the enterprise," Lycklama says. "What we want to do is look at experiences users have had with these second generation client/server tools." He defines second-generation as a three-tiered solution, consisting of the host, typically a mainframe, an application server in the middle, and PCs on the users' desks.

  "With the first generation, all you had to do is partition the application between the PC and the mainframe, or between the PC and the application server. Now you have to partition the application into three parts, so that's a bigger challenge." There are a lot of companies today providing tools for first-generation client/server solutions, and there are about half a dozen companies offering solutions in the second-generation space, Lycklama says. "One of the things this panel is going to address is, of those users using these advanced tools, what kind of experiences have they run into, what kind of problems have they encountered, what solution were they trying to build, and why did they look for these tools?"

  Products from Cognos, Forte, Dynasty, Visix, and Seer will be examined. The one end-user panelist confirmed for the session is David Doucette, a project manager with Multitasking Systems, who is using Cognos tools.

• "Portability Between UNIX and Win32" will be chaired by Pat Higbee, president of DataFocus. Win32 is the application programming interface (API) for Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows95 operating systems. "Our session is going to handle several issues regarding portability and interoperability between UNIX and Windows NT," Higbee says. DataFocus produces the Nutcracker family of tools that allow developers to move UNIX applications to Win32.

  Panel member Randall Howard, president of Mortice Kern Systems and a director of UniForum, will talk about the tools and utilities that UNIX developers are used to. "Between the APIs and the tools and utilities, that's a significant portion of what people need to be portable," Higbee says. A speaker from Digital Equipment Corp., Peter Lieberwirth, will address the X Window System components. "Digital has an X server and an X toolkit on the market," Higbee says. "He'll bring out the X aspects and Motif aspects to allow those applications to be both portable and interoperable, because an X server running on NT allows people to run applications that are running on UNIX but display them on their Windows workstations.

  Finally, George Stevenson, from Beame & Whiteside Software will speak on an NFS product that provides NFS compatibility and utilities like a Telnet server that allow additional interoperability. "When you put all the panel members together, it presents a very comprehensive solution for UNIX developers to be productive on the Windows NT environment," Higbee says.

• "Transaction-Based Application Development" will be chaired by Jim Johnson, chairman and founder of The Standish Group International. Johnson says, "It's going to be a discussion and debate on the merits of developing for a three-tiered architecture-what are the pros and cons, and how should you go about developing mission-critical transaction applications on client/server technology?" The subtopics will include scalability, ease of development, availability, and possible conflicts with certain other technologies. Reasons for project failure will also be discussed, including ways of avoiding others' mistakes. "I'm trying to make it lively," Johnson says. He'll use his paper Client/Server Goes Business-Critical as a partial basis for the session. "I want to get into some interesting discussions about what the real-life experiences have been. I want to ask some probing questions; some that panel members haven't thought about and that some of them might have a hard time answering. I want them to sweat a little bit. The most important thing is that people who come to the session get something out of it."

  Those who will benefit most from the session include "anyone who's developing mission-critical applications, and developing applications where they need availability, robustness, integrity, and security-the kind of things you would put on a system that is running a business," Johnson says. "The technical person may get something out of it, but the focus will be more philosophy, design, and architecture."

  Panel members will include Jeff Eppinger, director of project management with Transarc; Tony Storey, chief technology officer with IBM; Scott Silk, vice president of worldwide marketing for Unisys; Dave Carnese, chief scientist at Independent Technology; and Randy Snerik, a product development manager with AT&T.

• "Developing for Distributed Systems Management," chaired by Chet Geschickter, director of research for Hurwitz Consulting Group;
• "Integrating Client/Server Applications with Legacy Systems," chaired by Carol Realini, president and CEO of J. Frank Consulting;
• "Object-Oriented Application Development," chaired by Adrian Bowles, managing director of Atelier Research;
• "Integrated Application Development Environments," and "Scaling Open Applications Upward," both chaired by Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Consulting Group; and
• "UNIX, Mac, and Windows Cross-Platform Development Tools," chaired by Rebel Brown, president of Cognoscenti, Inc.