Users discover objects; early adopters pursue cost, time savings; others wait for products to embrace enterprise, team issues - object-oriented programming - Client/Server Computing Special Edition - Buyers Guide

Just the facts. It is midnight in San Jose, Calif. Officer David Metcalfe is completing a crime report on his fourth burglary case of the evening. Rather than filing three reports for each case, a task he would have previously done manually, he uses "Just the Facts" to do it once. This cuts the time spent on paperwork from 45 minutes per case to less than 10 minutes per case. What is different from most automated report writing scenarios is that Officer Metcalfe wrote the application himself.

Tired of dealing with budget restraints that precluded use of an outside firm to develop the application, Officer Metcalfe took on the fivemonth task using a point-and-click application development tool called ObjectVision from Borland International, Scotts Valley, Calif. Metcalfe also had the guidance and support of a computer committee of police department staff.

The project, supported by donations from approximately 20 hardware and software companies, was a success in end-user-driven application generation. "People can now form their own ideas and stay in control of the program to meet their needs," said Metcalfe, adding that changes can be made as needed.

The time was right for change, according to Louis A. Cobarruviaz, new on the job as San Jose's chief of police. "This project is the first phase of a planned revamping of our entire records management system. I intend to make the San Jose Police Department one of the most automated in the country."

The San Jose Police Department may be unique in some ways, but it is indicative of a new wave of client-driven applications, where managers are encouraging end users to take responsibility for automating their daily operations. These applications are fueled by increased use of object technology.

MANAGING THE ENTERPRISE

What, though, is the long-term impact of application building tools for end users? Enduser tools, as individual and specific problem solvers, have the potential to threaten efforts to integrate the enterprise under a comprehensive plan. IS managers want to provide a system which is managed to produce a long-term benefit for the organization.

Object technology has its origins in a singleuser view of the world, which does not address the concepts of enterprise or development teams. Some claim these types of tools may be best isolated for one-time applications that do not impact the information processing model of the enterprise.

There is more to application development than building a pleasing graphical user interface (GUI) that satisfies a specific set of functional requirements. Critical to deriving long-term benefit from object technology is to understand its impact on life-cycle time and the cost required to keep the application in productive operation within a changing business climate.

Some companies have taken early steps in attacking applications of significant scope in a commercial environment. The Tampa, Fla.based retail store chain Kash N' Karry thinks that object technology is mature enough to play a fundamental role in cross-enterprise application development. Kash N' Karry took a long, hard look at their approach to information processing technology and decided to rebuild the infrastructure.

Jim Stikeleather, director of MIS, was chartored with building an MIS organization that supported the vision of CEO Ron Floto of a flat, knowledge worker-based organization.

"Choosing objects was not necessarfly done in favor of objects, but in the realization that nothing else worked," said Stikeleather, whose organization had also looked at Case. "Objects provided an incremental way to try each step." Buflt in C++, Kash N' Karry developed a comprehensive development environment for core business applications. The company is not just targeting a pilot project, but all core business applications--applications that support significant transaction volumes, between 30,000 and 50,000 per day, at eight to 12 transactions per second, with subsecond response time and 500,000 object instances.

Few organizations are ready to take the bold approach of Kash N' Karry because of substantial investments in people, systems and software development technologies. These investments, though, need not prevent migration.

Cincinnati Bell Information Systems (CBIS) in Cincinnati is a historically mainframe-based firm. In an effort to move applications to a Unix platform, CBIS is developing a set of tools-- many of them object-oriented--to support a new generation of applications. "We are trying to apply the current state of the art in object orientation to a traditional on-line transaction processing environment," said Paul Albrecht, director of platform development. "We are looking into issues of performance and scalability."

One of the tools CBIS is using is ProKappa, a Unix-based, object-oriented application development system from Mountain View, Calif.based IntelliCorp. Having made an investment in computer-aided software engineering (Case)-ADW from KnowledgeWare, Inc., Atlanta--CBIS built a bridge in cooperation with IntelliCorp to import the data models developed in ADW into ProKappa for design and construction of the application.

Using this approach, CBIS can build on its investment in front-end planning and analysis and still meet its goal of building an open system. While the short-term goal was to import data models from Case to object technology, CBIS' longer-term outlook is for a more objectoriented or event-driven approach to Case. Kalev Ruberg, advisory knowledge architect in IBM Canada's Technical Products organization in Toronto, turned to object technology to meet modeling requirements in real-time mannfacturing applications. "The complexity and performance requirements for the project went beyond the capabilities of a relational database, forcing a hard look at object-oriented databases," said Ruberg.

The project's modeling of the manufacturing process required eight levels of complex relationship and status checking, according to Ruberg, which would have required seven or eight joins across multiple tables. In a relational system, "that would be impossible in realtime," he said.

After a brief evaluation of several object-oriented databases, Ruberg's group chose GemStone from Servio Corp., Alameda, Calif. His group began building a data logging application for manufacturing designed to operate in conjunction with a knowledge-based package called G2 from Gensym Corp., Cambridge, Mass., and a statistics package called Statit from Statware, Inc., Corvallis, Ore.

Development efforts are ongoing. Today, the application is about 10% complete but, according to Ruberg, "We have a fairly large data volume coming in."

These IS managers are demonstrating that object technology can extend beyond desktop tools to encompass the enterprise. While the results of their efforts have been successful, they have had to confront some tough issues.

ISSUES IN TRANSITION

IS managers are wary of object-oriented tools because many suppliers of those tools come from a "single-user, single-developer" view of the world. "There is a need for tools that are enterprise-oriented tools that address technical issues of multiple users on networks," said Kash N' Karry's Stikeleather. "There is also a need for good methodologies and Case tools."

While the power of object technology is attractive, its implementation in commercial data processing environments has been met with some caution and skepticism. "If you look at the major books on object orientation, you will not find the word 'transaction' in any of them," said Cincinnati Bell's Albrecht. For many IS managers, the desire for more mature enterprise-oriented tools is holding them back from initiating object-driven projects. Instead, they are choosing to explore object technology further and wait for the technology to mature.

The benefits of object technology--such as reusability, ease of use and therefore improved quality in the eyes of users, and suitability for distributed computing--are deep and long term. The value of investment in object technology comes from use in multiple projects, not just from a single effort. Evaluation should not be limited to a single project because the wrong pilot may have been chosen. Rather than jump into an object-oriented implementation across the organization, more cautious IS managers are taking time to learn the technology and build plans tailored to their organizations.

Object management technology is critical to achieving the combined benefits of highly productive end-user development and management of an enterprise model of applications. The single limiting factor that seems to be preventing rapid adoption of the technology is that it is unable to deliver the full benefits of objects in a form usable by the IS organization that is, able to handle large core applications in a distributed multiuser system.

"Object orientation provides quality and reusability but object-oriented tools have been too arcane and obscure for the average commercial developer," said Mitchell Kertzman, chairman and CEO of Powersoft Corp., Burlington, Mass.

Also, object techniques may be so inherent to the functionality of a tool that the techniques need not be made explicit selling points. For instance, when Powersoft first announced PowerBuilder in March 1991, the tool was described as offering "a balanced approach to both the object-oriented paradigm and the procedural orientation of the past." When the company announced Version 2.0 last April, it put greater emphasis on the object-oriented leatures, such as ObjectEasy. However, users were told they would have access to the features "without knowledge or use of traditional object-oriented languages."

This has proven true at AT&T Capital Corp., of Morristown, N.J., which brought in PowerBuilder more than a year ago. Sarah Edward, a programmer analyst at the firm, had previous experience with Oracle Forms from Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif.; Paradox from Borland; and Informix from Informix Software, Inc., Menlo Park, Calif. "PowerBuilder incorporates object-oriented philosophies, such as inheritance and polymorphism," she said. "It allows a tool bar with basic functions defined to be inherited for use in another place without having to rewrite the code."

A similar view was expressed by Rich Gerould, founder and CEO of Configurex, a San Francisco-based software supplier targeting developers. "The IS manager is looking for products that are application-oriented rather than just object-oriented--products that address the needs of the developer building enterprise-wide applications," he said.

Configurex has received interest in its products from companies pursuing object technology as a path to mainframe downsizing. Hexcel, a Dublin, Calif.-based manufacturing firm with $400 million in annual sales, is run on mainframe applications today. However, Hexcel recently became a beta site for the OS/2-based Enterprise Action package from Configurex.

"Our current use for software like this is to develop small support applications for software we've purchased," said Linda Eckern, a senior database administrator for Hexcel. "We do very little original programming here."

Some of the most aggressive adopters of object technology are the software suppliers themselves, many of which are using object technology to create products. At a recent Object World conference, Borland Chairman and CEO Phillipe Kahn stated that object technology is the foundation technology for the company's future products. Borland is joined by smaller software companies in using objectoriented languages such as C++ or Smalltalk to build new products. Indigo Software, San Mateo, Calif., is building a report writer based on Microsoft Windows 3.1 using C++.

On a smaller scale, Augustus Klein, former CEO of Stepstone Corp., Sandy Hook, Conn., developer of the object-oriented Objective C language, began practicing what he used to preach. As president and CEO of Uniquest, Inc., Jacksonville, Fla., Klein now uses Objective C to rewrite DOS-based applications.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

Individual success stories do not guarantee a trend in common industry practice. The information systems industry has resisted many highly publicized trends in the past and has been slow to adopt others. The number and breadth of object-oriented success stories, though, has reached a level that requires serious consideration on the part of the prudent IS manager. Large organizations are beginning to take the first stop toward objects.

"We are now starting to develop some core business applications where we will parallel the traditional approach with a small-scale object-oriented approach," said Dr. Charles Popper, chief information officer at pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., in Rahway, N.J. "We have the people who have the skills and anticipate a real positive impact--but we are proceeding one step at a time," he said.

While some early adopters have had significant success with the technology, others have chosen to wait on the sidelines until the risk and learning investment are reduced. It is significant that even those who find the initial investment in object technology larger than expected still find it worth the effort.

Suppliers of software products are becoming increasingly aware of the demand to provide products that address the needs of multiuser applications developed by teams rather than single individuals. Software managers can now look forward to reduced risk of entry and reduced training requirements because of their investments.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Wiesner Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group