MINUTES OF THE ANSA TECHNICAL BOARD
held on
9th January 1998 at APM, Cambridge
Present: Bill, O'Riordan (Chairman), Andrew Herbert (Chief Architect), Yvonne Peat (Secretary), Chris Mayers (APM/Digitivity), Bob Briscoe (BT), Patrick Dunne (BT), Robert Ghansa-Hercock (BT), Ian Marshall (BT), Pete Young (BT), Takanori Ugai (Fujitsu), Paul Johnson (GEC-M), Robert Johnston (GEC-M), Andy Lingard (GEC-M), Ian Davies (GPT), Neil Mason (GPT), Lone Leth Thomsen (ICL), Bent Thomsen (ICL)
Guest: Gordon Blair (Lancaster University)
Apologies Dr Kazuhiro Matsuo (Fujitsu), Dr Koji Tajima (Fujitsu - arrived 2pm), Will Stewart (GEC-M)
Copies of all the presentations were circulated and are also available on the Sponsor Web Pages.
The E2S End-to-end Internet Security Project completed in December with a successful final review. Andrew gave an update on the revisions made to the E2S Architecture and the set of electronic commerce demonstrators built by the E2S partners.
The E2S architecture is a public result.
APM has been defining the overall FollowMe architecture and produced a first architecture description. Mike gave a guided tour of the Architecture.
The Architecture is a joint FollowMe Project/ANSA result.
Mike gave the presentation on Richard’s behalf due to Richard having just become a father.
Mobility features have been added to FlexiNet to provide a "Mobile Object Workbench" for the FollowMe project. Mike gave a description of the engineering detail of the workbench.
Andrew explained why it has been decided to use FlexiNet rather than Kafka. although some of the ideas in Kafka will still be used. Some members of the Board expressed concern that FlexiNet will not be recognised by the end-users whereas Kafka would be. Takanori Ugai will be providing a Kafka interface on top of FlexiNet.
The Presentation stimulated a lot of discussion culminating in a request for a longer session on this subject at the next meeting.
ACTION: AJH
This work is a joint FollowMe/ANSA result.
Mobile agents present two security challenges. Firstly secure communications between agents, secondly defending agents from tampering by "hostile" hosts. Will described the initial plans to provide security to FollowMe agents.
This work is a joint FollowMe/ANSA result.
Douglas reported on Zihue Wu's progress developing a Declarative Transaction Framework for FlexiNet and gave a demonstration of the current status. (Zixhue has had to return to China because of a serious illness in his family.)
This work is an ANSA result.
Will and Matthew reported on the status of the FlexiNet work on declarative binding. Will has developed a binding configuration language and Matthew has developed FlexiNet mechanisms to animate the language.
It was suggested that Will should look at Ensemble/Maestro which is sucessfully being used by Gordon Blair in a joint project between Lancaster and BT.
ACTION: WTH
This work is an ANSA result.
We invited Gordon Blair to give ANSA sponsors a briefing of current and planned work around the use of reflective techniques and advanced binding models.
Recommendation by the Board to make FlexiNet available to Lancaster University and to invite Gordon to future TB meetings.
ACTION: YP
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