MINUTES OF THE ANSA TECHNICAL BOARD

held on

14th October 1997 at APM, Cambridge

Present: Bill, O'Riordan (Chairman), Andrew Herbert (Chief Architect), Yvonne Peat (Secretary), Richard Hayton (APM), Andre Kramer (APM), Bob Briscoe (BT), Steve Rudkin (BT), Alan Smith (BT), Jérôme Tassel (BT), Jean-Bernard Stefani (CNET), David Snelling (FECIT), Dr Tajima (Fujitsu), Neil Mason (GPT), Lone Leth Thomsen (ICL), Bent Thomsen (ICL)

Apologies Martin French (TC Chairman), David Hearn (DERA), Dr Matsuo (Fujitsu), Andrew Farncombe (GEC-Marconi),

Welcome and review of Agenda

1 MC UPDATE

The Chairman gave a quick review of the Management Board meeting yesterday. He reported that it had been decided that in future the Management and Technical Committees would be referred to as the Management and Technical Boards as the title Committee gave the wrong impression. All the presentations from yesterday’s and today’s meetings will be published on the sponsor area of the APM Research web pages.

Copies of all the following presentations were circulated.

2 DIMMA UPDATE - Simon Waterhouse

Simon reported on the improvements made to the DIMMA code since the last TC, which have dramatically improved performance. This code has been released to sponsors as an ANSA deliverable.

New documentation: Design and Implementation APM:2063 and Performance Analysis APM:2046

3 JAVA APPLICATION ARCHITECTURES - Matthew Faupel

Matthew presented the results of monitoring industry initiatives on application deployment architectures that relate to FlexiNet. He Concluded that the area is currently in a mess, with no one addressing the whole picture. FlexiNet will resolve many of the missing areas.

The report is APM:2038.

4 FLEXINET ENGINEERING FRAMEWORK - Richard Hayton

Presentation on the architecture for FlexiNet and its features, deliverables APM.2047.01 FlexiNet ORB Framework and FlexiNet Release 1.0 Code.

5 ENGINEERING SECURITY - Dave Otway

Presentation on the implementation of a secure session facility for Java using the evolving FlexiNet framework as a guide and the lessons learned.

The report is currently Crown Copyright, APM have applied for permission to publish and will inform the ANSA sponsors as soon as this is achieved.

6 DECLARATIVE SECURITY POLICY - Takanori Ugai

Takanori reported on his investigations into how to express security policy for agent systems declaratively and how to transform policies into security engineering. Fujitsu are kindly making Takanori’s findings an ANSA result.

The Chairman complimented Takanori on giving such a complex presentation in a language that was not his mother tongue.

7 MARIMBA - Mike Bursell and Douglas Donaldson

Douglas presented the findings of his and Mike’s investigations into Marimba as a Java deployment technology. During the lunch break Mike ran several demonstrations.

8 OBJECT MONITOR - David Franklin

Presentation and demonstration of ObjectMonitor, which is an ObjectLab deliverable, offered as background input to ANSA.

9 FollowMe - Will Harwood

Will reported that FollowMe had officially started on 1^st October and gave an overview of the project partners and the tasks which have been assigned to APM. The project is now being managed by FAST rather than APM with the kick-off meeting in Munich tomorrow. The project will be used to augment ANSA funding for 1998 and the tasks will form the foundation for the 1998 work plan.

The FollowMe Technical Annex is available to sponsors as APM.2075.01.00

10 PEGASUS UPDATE - Tim Harris

Tim is a PhD student sponsored by APM to work on the Pegasus project, which is APM background to ANSA.

11 TRANSACTIONS ON THE INTERNET - Zhixue Wu

Wu presented his initial findings of his investigation of transactions as a potential candidate for exploring declarative approaches to modelling constraints on component behaviour. Wu is basing his work on the work done by John Warne and Owen Rees on concurrency in the atomic model. It was proposed that this work should form part of FlexiNet.

12 BINDING - Oyvind Hanssen

Oyvind is a visitor from the University of Tromso and will be returning home in December. He reported on his investigations into the design of binding mechanisms for component-oriented middleware. Report - APM.2057.01.01 FlexiNet - Binding Framework

Chairman wished him luck on his return to Norway.

13 FLEXINET FORWARD PLANNING - Richard Hayton and Andrew Herbert

Richard and Andrew confirmed the objectives, scope and expected deliverables from FlexiNet for the coming 3-5 months.

Bob Briscoe asked when would the sponsors be getting involved with reviews and workshops.

Richard asked the sponsors to evaluate the reports and software released at this TC and feed back by email. Can then decide if/when a workshop is required. He would like to try to run a discussion group across the web.

BT expressed an interest in the work on multi-party binding within FlexiNet.

It was decided that a workshop combining FlexiNet work, the related work that Newcastle are doing and ReTina be scheduled as a "Binding Workshop" and a second workshop on Java Beans etc should be organised for late November or early December.

Action – APM

The plan was accepted.

14 ANY OTHER BUSINESS

There was no further business

15 DATE OF NEXT MEETING

Technical Board Thursday 8th January (all day) with a dinner in the evening and the Management Board on Friday 9^th January (half day ending with lunch).