Computing's Middle Ground

By Charles Waltner

rganizations are building complex distributed computing environments and are relying on these systems to help them remain competitive. CIOs who want to link their distributed environments now face a difficult question: Which of three major middleware platforms-Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (Corba), or Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)-is best?

For years, DCE was the only choice. It was introduced 10 years ago as th e first attempt to standardize the basic infrastructure for distributed applications, and over the years it has gained a foothold in many organizations.

But analysts say the highly complex DCE is losing ground as the two newer solutions gain support from vendors. Corba, an open standard overseen by the Object Management Group, in Framingham, Mass., and DCOM from Microsoft show promise as middleware platforms of the future.

The stakes are high in this battle for control of distributed computing environments. These middleware technologies promise to meld diverse networks, allowing mainframes, workstations, and all forms of client-server systems to work together easily. They work by providing a common interface language that serves as a universal translator of sorts between any two applications.

"The idea is to tie together all the different systems that have been developed over 20 years," says Bob Anderson, managing analyst for application component services at Datapro Information Services Group in Delran, N.J.

The need for dependable distributed computing middleware en- vironments is greater than ever as complex three-tier networks-which include database or transaction servers combined with traditional client-server networks-be- come more commonplace. Also, companies are under increasing pressure to harness their computing resources and deliver data to partners, vendors, and suppliers.

DCE, a standard managed by the Open Group in Boston, is the middleware of choice at many organizations ( see related story ). The Open Group says DCE is provided by more vendors and has been ported to more platforms than any other middleware technology, and predicts strong growth for DCE through 1999.

Despite DCE's maturity and support by major vendors, some observers say it's a fading star as the early technology used to create it falls out of favor.

"For whatever reason, DCE missed the boat. Perhaps it was too far ahead of its time," says Nick Gall, a senior r esearch analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Waltham, Mass.

DCE's complexity and a lack of expertise on the technology has been a major hindrance to its widespread adoption.

DuPont & Co. in Wilmington, Del., wants to give its network users broader access to data and is testing DCE to see if the technology can deliver. But Rob Harris, a senior IS specialist at DuPont, says efforts have been slowed by DCE's long learning curve. "Our problem is a lack of trained resources," Harris says.

Though DCE has been around for years, there aren't a lot of people who understand it. An InformationWeek survey of 100 IS managers shows that lack of expertise was the top reason given for not moving to DCE, followed by a lack of DCE-based products, high costs, and security concerns.

Observers say the newer, object-based technologies seem to hold the most potential for creating seamless distributed computing environments, despite the fact that Corba is struggling to establish its standards and DCOM has yet to prove it c an operate as a cross-platform solution.

"The hope is that as Corba and DCOM evolve, you'll find that object request brokers are the way to go," Anderson says. "They just need to evolve to encompass security, directory, and other critical services."

Object request brokers serve as control centers of sorts for translating information between disparate applications. They work in conjunction with an interface definition language (IDL), which provides the "wrapper" for object- oriented middleware that lets various programs talk to one another.

A Boost For Corba
Corba got a major lift last month, when IBM introduced a Corba-based suite of middleware products, including Component Broker Connector and Component Broker Toolkit. Karen Boucher, an analyst with the Standish Group in Dennis, Mass., says the suite was a big boost for Corba. Until then, organizations interested in using Corba had to search far and wide to assemble the tools they needed to build a Corba environment.

Boucher expe cts IBM to offer its Corba development suite for free with many of its products, just as Microsoft provides DCOM for free with its Windows NT systems.

Some organizations getting an early taste of Corba are finding that dealing with its object-oriented approach is within their capabilities. Cable News Network's CNN Interactive division in Atlanta has been piloting a program since December that uses Corba to distribute part of its news content to 100 different Internet publishing partners. Before that, CNN had to screen-scrape its Web site for news stories, deconstruct them from HTML, then send them out. Now, a Corba application goes out on the network, finds any new content, and automatically notifies users, says Al Issa, a software-development architect with CNN Interactive.

Corba also makes the content appear local to programmers so that they don't have to worry about details such as IP addresses. "It actually made life a lot simpler," Issa says. Implementation of the middleware has gone so well that Issa plans to use Corba to distribute the rest of CNN's news content by the end of the summer.

But Corba isn't without its dark side. The technology still lacks a security standard, though that is promised for the coming year. There's also some question of how much support the technology will receive from vendors. Although companies such as Netscape, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems have agreed to support emerging standards, they could decide not to create many Corba products if another technology comes along.

Risk Vs. Rewards
Still, Corba boosters say the rewards more than outweigh the risks. Wayne Haughey, a group leader at the engines information systems division of AlliedSignal Inc., a maker of airline engine parts in Phoenix, says his company selected Corba because the object-oriented programming environment lets his staff reuse and quickly modify program designs.

Also, since programmers don't have to start from scratch each time they build an application, it's easier to refine an ex isting program or customize a standard design. And since Corba is cross-platform, code created for a program on one platform can be easily transferred to another. Haughey says AlliedSignal is so confident in Corba that it's committed to using it in a two-year project to develop a Web-equipped network.

Others are going with DCOM. "If you're Microsoft-centric right now, DCOM is a very elegant way to go," Anderson says. The only drawback is that DCOM is far from being a cross-platform solution. It's not yet operable on many systems outside of Windows NT-no small issue when considering an environment for multiplatform networks.

"You want the highest degree of flexibility when setting up one of these middleware environments, and you can't get that with DCOM because it's created by one vendor," Boucher adds.

DCOM support is coming. Software AG of North America in Reston, Va., this month will release a number of porting solutions for DCOM to Unix, including one for Linux, Digital Unix, and Sun's Solaris. It's also working on porting for IBM's MVS.

A spokesman for Microsoft says the company is recruiting partners to port DCOM to other platforms, but he wouldn't provide details.

The porting solutions for DCOM might prove effective. Joe Persichetti, a senior software designer for Dow Jones & Co. in Princeton, N.J., wanted to access data on a Solaris machine to meet a special request by customers to view some of Dow Jones' financial data via Excel spreadsheets. Persichetti says he wanted to port DCOM rather than work with Corba because most of his experience is with Windows. "It wasn't such a reach for me to use DCOM," he says. He used an unpublished beta version of Software AG's DCOM for the Enterprise product and experienced no problems,although he had to write additional code to compensate for DCOM's asynchronous protocols.

Regardless of which middleware platform an organization selects, the key for IS managers is to commit to a particular approach and stick with it, says Marvin Allen Wolfthal, te chnology director of consulting firm Fusion Systems Group Inc. in New York. "Frequent changes in a network environment will be too disruptive to provide any benefit," he says.

But companies "need to start at least experimenting with this technology because in the future, it will be absolutely critical to get all systems working together," Anderson says. "If you don't do it, you'll be out of business."

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