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INDUSTRY WATCH: Fractured Standards
By David Rubinstein
 April 15, 2004 — I remember, in the days long before high definition and digital surround sound, watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons with segments called “Fractured Fairy Tales,” which took fable characters such as Rapunzel or Hansel and Gretel and put them in comic situations, with the classic narration of legendary character actor Edward Everett Horton tying it all together.
Occasionally, my parents would come into the room to watch the show with me, but after only a few minutes, they would get up and leave, baffled at how someone could take a literary classic and skewer it in that way.
I, on the other hand, much preferred the comic tales to the originals, having at the ripe age of 10 come to understand that fairy tales are, well, for babies. They were fine for the little ones—in fact, today, my young children still enjoy hearing about Jack and the Giant and all the rest. But I needed something more, something a little different, than the storybooks could provide.
I bring this up because it’s a nice memory for me, but also because we’re hearing a lot of talk that enterprise development teams need something more, something a little different, than the old existing industry standards can provide.
Did fracturing those fairy tales make cartoon producer Jay Ward a bad person? No. The fairy tales remain, and parents continue to read them to their youngsters time and again. Does fracturing software make those responsible for it in any way evil? No. The standards remain for developers to write against and use as a basis for interoperability and compatibility.
Look at Java, and Linux, and now, perhaps, the Unified Modeling Language. All have a common base to them, yet software tools and platform providers are building, or have said they will build, proprietary features above the standard.
When people hear of fracturing standards, immediately they warn, “Look what happened to Unix!” They claim that those who can’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
However, there is a difference. In the above cases, a standard was able to emerge before the splintering; with Unix, there already were multiple versions before a standard could be agreed upon.
Also, coding connectors to get Unix variants to work together was a pain…much in the same way that my cartoon-watching days were made more difficult by my having to get up and walk over to the television set to change the channel, and then play with the rabbit-ear antennas to improve the signal.
Today, we have remote control and cable; the software industry has Web services and service-oriented architectures to help overcome the interoperability issues.
In the Java realm, IBM and BEA insist that demand from their customers has driven them to add features above and beyond what Sun’s JCP has defined as the Java 2 specification.
In the Linux world, Novell has announced it will add its proprietary NetWare kernel into an Open Enterprise Server, where it will share space with the Linux kernel. How long before the proprietary Novell features turn up in a new version of Linux from Novell? Not long, is our guess. Yet the base-level industry standards remain; for people who need an IBM system to work with a BEA system, applications can be written that don’t require any of the proprietary features of either.
And now, UML. When IBM acquired Rational, and then Borland acquired TogetherSoft, two of the leading independent modeling companies suddenly were gone. You don’t hear much about Rose anymore, as IBM instead touts the XDE tools. Together Control Center seemingly has become a mere add-in to Borland’s IDE suites.
Take the Model Driven Architecture. Several modeling vendors already have positioned themselves as leading vendors of MDA tools, even though common specifications aren’t even finished yet, and we haven’t heard of any enterprise companies implementing it as yet. These tools probably won’t take off until more transformation patterns that enable platform-independent models to become platform-specific models are validated.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has made noises that it, too, will include a modeler more robust than Visio in its Visual Studio IDE at some future date. Work has barely begun, and already Microsoft has created notations that are not part of the UML specification. But models can be written to the UML standard for importing into any tool that supports the standard.
As long as interoperability can be assured, there is no reason for our industry to fear the splintering of technology as it did during the height of the Unix variations.
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt might have said (if recreated by Mr. Ward): “There is nothing to fear but fear itself…and the complete destruction of the world as we know it.”
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times. |
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