InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
January 5, 1998
Components On Track
Enhanced management facilities should boost component-based developmentBy Rich Levin
"Corporate developers discovered there were few ways to easily manage all of the software parts they were building," says J.P. Morgenthal, an analyst with NC.Focus, an IT consulting firm in Hewlett, N.Y., that specializes in distributed object architectures.
Developers ne
ed an integrated view into their various repositories of software components. They also need tools that let them monitor components as they run in an executing application across a network.
Component management is suddenly hot because component-based development is becoming the standard way for corporate IS departments to quickly deploy critical business applications. Component-based systems simplify large-scale development by giving developers a way to encapsulate business services as reusable application logic. Components reduce the amount of code programmers have to write, shortening development cycles by letting applications share common functionality. Once a part is defined, it can be reused without recompiling or requiring access to the source code.
Telecommunications carrier Ameritech, for example, is consolidating its cellular sales and customer-service applications into a single program. The system is being built around a pure component architecture and represents a radical reengineering of leg
acy applications and data store interfaces.
Some of the systems being converted were written in the early '70s. "There are hundreds of forms and thousands of stored procedures being componentized," says Dave Mendlen, director of development for Ameritech, in Chicago. "We expect to reduce everything to about 150 reusable controls and remote OLE servers. We've been lucky that most of our legacy code was well-written, so interfacing with the logic has been straightforward."
Utilities Needed
Worse, while most component-based applications are centralized on back-end servers, the objects they spawn reside on multiple clients and servers in various locations, says Ron
Engle, senior systems integration engineer in NationsBank's Chicago office. Taking a server application offline may not stop multiple component services from running amok elsewhere on the global network.
NationsBank is opening its major databases to a thin-client interface through server-side applications made of Java objects and components. This year, the bank hopes to provide browser-based access to 6,000 consumer and commercial customers, in addition to 10,000 internal users already on its intranet. Until recently, the tools to manage this expansion haven't been available, says Engle.
Updated Suites
Microsoft recently posted an early version of its Visual Component Man
ager to an area of its Web site accessible only to registered Visual Basic and Visual Studio developers. The 1.0 alpha release works with Visual Basic 5.0 and can be used to publish, organize, search, and sort reusable Visual Basic components. Visual Component Manager handles ActiveX controls and designers, source code, application templates, and programming wizards within a common management interface.
Big changes are in store for the product in 1998. Sources say it will grow from an add-on product into a robust command center for managing discrete components across all of Microsoft's tools and server products. The update, slated to coincide with the delivery of Microsoft's Visual Studio '98 tool suite, will be positioned as a developer's home base or central dispatch site for finding, inspecting, and reusing business logic across the enterprise.
"When you select a component, Visual Component Manager provides mechanisms to drill down, and get insight into them to figure out how you're going to be able to
reuse them," says a developer working with early Visual Component Manager 98 code. "For instance, what are the operations, attributes, events, or methods of a particular component? You can view those, qualify for reuse, or make modifications, visually."
The update will also expand Visual Component Manager's role from a nifty VB add-on to a shared management console. Today, it stores relations and their Unified Modeling Language constructs within the Microsoft Repository. The update will provide a mechanism to meld the tools in Visual Studio. Developers will be able to take a component and reuse it in VB, Visual J++, and Visual C++.
Also, the product will let development teams categorize their component frameworks across multiple repositories, sources say, helping organizations push component reuse beyond the project level. For example, teams will be able to establish their own workgroup, enterprise, personal, or project repositories, using any UML-compliant database compatible with Microsoft's repositor
y specification. Visual Component Manager will overlay the repository, and become the GUI console by which developers exchange components between multiple unrelated teams.
For component management on the run-time side, Visual Component Manager 98 will hand off duties to the forthcoming Microsoft Management Console, expected in late 1998 from the Windows NT server group. Ultimately, developers will be able to watch the performance and activities of a single component from Microsoft Management Console, according to a Microsoft source. The console will hook into NT's Active Directory to figure out where components are, in addition to how they're running. Developers will have a single interface to watch, manage, or administer either a set of components, or all the components that are being called on one machine, or on the network.
Microsoft officials won't go into specifics, but they confirm major changes are in the works. "VCM is not yet an integral part of the development environment," says Simon Poile, Mic
rosoft's product manager for Visual Studio and shared tool technologies. "As we move forward, we'll see the richness of the interface evolve, and a lot more integration with the variety of language products that make up Visual Studio."
RAD, Man
PowerSite will deliver a team-oriented component manager. The PowerSite Component Manager is a scalable Web object management system, based on an underlying relational database, for administering complex and constantly changing Web components, such as HTML, scripts, and ActiveX and Java objects.
The tool provides a high-level graphical interface that lets developers manage component reuse, version control, rollback recovery,
and assignment of user rights, roles, and authorization levels, all through an integrated security management layer. PowerSite can also import-or "slurp," in Sybase vernacular-entire Web sites into the Component Manager, letting development teams rapidly integrate existing sites into a management framework.
The addition of component management to Sybase's Web development efforts is a "quantum leap over anything we have now," says Sean Rhody, a New York beta tester and senior consultant for Computer Sciences Corp. in El Segundo, Calif. "The import facilities are key. I can bring in existing systems that leverage multiple component types and immediately improve my management control and application reuse for very large and complex sites."
Not to be outdone, Borland also has component management in the works. Borland's AppCenter, expected later this year, leverages Borland's Entera middleware to provide controls for distributed applications and their components. The tool provides centralized control for dis
tributed applications running on multiple hardware and software platforms.
AppCenter comprises three components, according to Borland sources: a graphical viewer for editing and monitoring multiple application configurations, a monitor, a repository server, and multiple interfaces to managed components and application services.
Through the viewer, developers will be able to start, stop, and poll applications and collect server status messages. Agents reside on individual machines hosting servers, and handle remote instrumentation, starting, stopping, and monitoring services.
"We have some very advanced tools under development for distributed application management," says Del Yocam, Borland's CEO. "AppCenter will help developers visually understand the distributed nature of applications, whether they're written using Delphi, Corba, or other facilities. It's a pretty sophisticated system for managing objects, tracking performance, and automatically starting and stopping additional processes."
New compo
nent management tools won't be limited to the leading desktop RAD vendors. A number of other enterprise development tools vendors are already moving in on the territory, with many more expected to follow as the year progresses.
Select Software Tools of Irvine, Calif., rolled out its multiplatform Select Component Manager in October. While the current release supports Distributed Component Object Model and Corba object models, a future edition will add support for the UML and Meta Object Facility information mo- dels, plus ActiveX and JavaBeans. The update is expected later this year.
Select Component Manager provides the basis for companies to implement an enterprise- wide supplier-consumer model for component development and consumption. Under this scenario, component suppliers encapsulate existing IT assets as components and build new components as needed. Component "consumers" such as business users can assemble applications from components made available through Select Component Manager's visual inte
rface.
RAD tool vendor SuperNova Inc. in Edison, N.J., also recently announced the general availability of its component management tool Visual Concepts. This product uses a virtual machine to incorporate components on more than 20 platforms and 25 databases into a single developer's workbench.
Visual Concepts supports a number of component interfaces and platforms, including ActiveX, OLE, COM, Corba, Internet Inter-ORB Protocol, RMI, Visual Basic dynamic link libraries, Java applets and beans, C and C++ objects, and Borland's Delphi and Sybase's PowerBuilder intrinsic objects.
In the Enterprise JavaBeans space, tools vendors are expected to follow the early lead of San Francisco-based WebLogic Inc. A forthcoming upgrade of the company's Tengah Java application server will provide management facilities for Enterprise JavaBeans, once the EJB specification is finalized in 1998.
Some corporate developers already use an early version of the WebLogic tool, which implements about half of the EJB specificati
on. "The component management features are very handy," says Nisar Ahmad, principal designer and system engineer with AT&T Labs in Lincroft, N.J. "The sooner we get our hands on the final EJB tools, the better we are at planning and designing. But it's an advantage to be able to experiment right away."
Tengah already provides a Java-based GUI management console for remotely monitoring distributed Java components. The remote-management window displays thread, socket, and memory allocation. It also provides application access control and remote diagnostics, manages database connections, and allows dynamic reconfiguration or relocation of run-time components between multiple servers. All of these services are expected to be extended to support EJB.
Ahmad's group at AT&T is implementing a teleconferencing system that lets seven end users collaborate through any Java-capable Web browser. The development effort uses Tengah's Java objects and components on both client and server sides. "The WebLogic managemen
t tools have proven really valuable," Ahmad says. "They provide seamless integration with the development environment and application components."
While key pieces of component development are missing, developers can expect them to come on line quickly this year. Judith Hurwitz, president of the Hurwitz Group, in Newton, Mass., says, "The products have been focused on modeling, design, and coding, but component-based apps require the same development life cycle as other systems, including management."
f 1997 was the year of component-based development, then 1998 will emerge as the year of component management. Corporate developers spent last year building component-based applications and are now demanding development tools that can help them track and reuse software components.
But efforts to componentize legacy systems don't always go smoothly. That's because most third- and fourth-generation languages and rapid application development tools don't provide the design- and run-time utilities developers need to locate, query, consume, monitor, and load-balance thousands of components that make up an application.
Virtually every major vendor of component development tools has recently released or is developing enhanced management facilities that are expected to hit the market this year. Microsoft, Sybase-Powersoft, and Borland will soon roll out significant updates to their tool suites, including visual component-management consoles.
Sybase is delivering on its component management tools strategy and was expected to ship its PowerSite Enterprise 1.0 last month. The RAD tool, a complete visual development environment for building, managing, and deploying enterprise-class Web applications, is a key component of the company's PowerStudio multilanguage tools suite.
Featured Microsite
