Last month I began reporting the highlights, and a few lowlights, from key sessions at the recent IPROF forum held in Sunnyvale, Calif. This month I will report on two SIGs that did not even exist two years ago -- SIGWEB and SIGJAVA -- and a roundup of important roundtable Q&As.
SIGWEB
STRAW POLLS. Rick Gilligan, SIGWeb Secretary, led the
discussions and conducted
straw polls of attendees to gauge the level of penetration of web
technology into the
organizations represented. The results of the polls are shown below.
CURRENTLY RUNNING A WEB SERVER OR PLANNING A WEB SERVER WITHIN 12 MONTHS
WHEN HP 3000 ONLY HP 3000+OTHER OTHER ONLY
Running now 1 10 10
Next six months 0 3 0
Six-twelve months 1 3 0
---- ---- ----
2 16 10
ACCESSING HP 3000 DATA FROM WEB SERVER ON NON-HP 3000 PLATFORM
WHEN NUMBER
Running now 3
Next six months 4
Six-twelve months 5
----
12
HOW ARE YOU USING YOUR WEB SERVERS?
TYPE NUMBER
Internet only 12
Intranet only 3
Both 10
WEB SERVERS IN USE
NAME NUMBER
Apache 2
Open Market 1
NCSA 0
QSS QWEBS 1
Home grown 0
Mixture 5
----
9
WANT TO STANDARDIZE ON A SINGLE HP 3000 WEB SERVER
Yes 8
No 5
All counts are
attendees, not machines. Most attendees appeared to represent more than one
system --
approximately 125 HP 3000s were represented.HP 3000 INTEROPERABILITY SOLUTION. Alvina Nishimoto of HP gave a presentation based on the talk given during the January Strategic Directions Video Conference. Her key point was that the HP 3000 must interoperate with Unix systems and increasingly with NT systems.
Nishimoto discussed the screen scraper products from Apertus, M.B. Foster, and Minisoft that can interface existing HP 3000 VPlus applications with PC clients across Internet, intranet and LAN connections, often without modifying the original application. She also discussed the various ODBC and JDBC approaches to retrieving data from the HP 3000 for use by PC clients. Finally, she discussed middleware products and showed a specific architecture for data retrieval using web servers (see figure below).
WEB WEB
CLIENT SERVER HP 3000
---------------- -------------------------- -----------------------
| WEB BROWSER | | HTML PAGES | | |
---------------- | / \ /--------MSG FILE--\ |
| HTTPD CGI SCRIPT ---\ | BUS APP |
-------------------------- \- MSG FILE--/ |
-----------------------
The current availability of a time-limited evaluation copy of the Open Market Web Server Was also noted. It can be downloaded from the CSY Jazz Web server.
Nishimoto also gave a pitch for various tutorials that will be presented at HPWorld in Chicago this summer: setting up a web server, CGI programming for file and database access, tools (e.g. middleware), electronic commerce and a security overview
WEB SERVER SECURITY. The session then turned to a discussion of web server security and authentication issues. Attendees asked a lot of questions, but there were very few answers -- about security of other files on the server, encryption, password access, authentication and "steady state connection." Typical applications where security is a concern involved downloading software/updates and college programs that deal with schedules and grades.
Nishimoto was asked about Kerberos availability for the HP 3000. Without making any commitments, she said HP was moving away from Kerberos as a standard to Praesidium. My take on this is that you should forget about Kerberos ever being available on the HP 3000.
DEMOS, SERVER PROS AND CONS. Neil Armstrong of Robelle gave a presentation on generating HTML documents directly from IMAGE and Allbase databases using the STExport module of Suprtool [Editor's note: see the February 1997 issue of The 3000 NewsWire for a Test Drive of Suprtool.]
This was followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of various web servers available on the HP 3000 (See figure below).
PRO CON
Apache/iX free free
constantly updated to meet no secure implementation
evolving standards
large installed base
supports most platforms
used by many developers
FastCGI support
pre-allocated process pool
Open Market sold by HP $
supported by HP
secure version available
stable
pre-allocated process pool
QWEBS designed for HP 3000 $
does not use HFS no secure implementation
supports user exits to XL
through cgi (very fast)
excellent support for COBOL
pre-allocated process pool
NCSA free no support
no secure version
no pre-alloc. process pool
The attendees were polled on why each would or would not want to run a web server on the HP 3000. The most common reason for using a 3000 was simplicity -- one server program, one platform, one backup.
Attendeees' reasons for not running a web server on the HP 3000 included lack of speed, even with preallocated server processes; flexibility; security (a server is better suited to a separate machine, or a trusted server, possibly outside firewall); scalability; and more availability of talent familiar with other platforms.
Reasons for running a split architecture -- including HP 3000 but with the server on a non-HP 3000 -- included acknowledgement that the HP 3000 is better as database server than as web server; other platforms are better at scripting; and it's a way to enable load sharing.
ANONYMOUS FTP. The lack of this feature on the HP 3000 is becoming increasingly burdensome. The basic problem is that MPE/iX lacks chroot to restrict access to the directory tree. One possible workaround involves using some default password as part of the URL:
ftp://[username]:[password]@[host:port]/[path]
Some of the potential security problems with FTP are a user's ability to PUT and then STREAM with the SITE command, and working with released files in PM groups (which is always a problem, regardless of FTP support). Some tricks to try to work around these are creating a logon UDC to restrict/logoff; disallowing IA and disallowing SF.
SIGJAVA
Gavin Scott, SIGJava leader, led the discussions. First up was Bob
Hansen of HP's
Computer Language Labs to present HP's plans for Java on HP's Unix
platforms (for
general information see http://www.hp.com/go/java). Highlights were:
* HP is finishing work on a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler for HP-UX
* HP's JIT compiler will outperform any other RISC JIT compiler
* HP is licensing Sun's Java workshop for HP-UX, NT and MPE/iX
Mike Yawn of CSY presented an update on Java for the HP 3000. Yawn is the engineer responsible for bringing the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to the HP 3000. It started out as an "on my own time" investigation but is now a funded project.
Release 1.1 is in beta testing this month and will require MPE/iX 5.5 (See related story in this issue). The use of POSIX threads instead of Java threads is under consideration. JVM now supports 35 threads. Porting the JIT compiler to MPE/iX is under consideration and supporting the Java Workshop environment on MPE is a possibility, but not a high priority
WHERE TO BEGIN. Gavin Scott presented a session titled "Getting Started with Java." He stated that "Java in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly (www.ora.com) is the best book for learning Java and is also a good reference source. An updated version covering Java 1.1 should be available soon. For general object-oriented concepts, Scott and Yawn both recommend "Design Patterns" (Gamma et al) and Scott added, "Object oriented program moves much more of the programming into the design."
Some ideas from Scott's presentation:
* There is nothing magical about Java; in fact, it may be a case of being in the right place at the right time. However, it also probably has the best combination of features of the various object languages
* Java is totally object oriented
* The goal is for Java to be platform independent; i.e. write once, run anywhere. The reality is that you still need to test it on different platforms because it may look different
* Java is very forgiving
* The first law of Java is you cannot enforce security on an untrusted machine; you need to enforce security on the server
* Java has good exception handling built-in
* Java does its own garbage collection
* Symantec's Cafe is recommended for general development; Visual Cafe is recommended for the development of graphical front-ends (developers doing serious client/server work should probably have both)
* Microsoft's J++ is essentially the same development environment as Visual C++, so if you like Visual C++, you might want to use J++
* Beware of Microsoft's efforts to lure you into using such nonportable technology as ActiveX.
NATIVE METHOD CALLS. Yawn then talked about Native Method Calls, a Java facility that allows calls to routines written in another language. It can therefore be used to call MPE intrinsics or other routines that reside in XLs. A stub or interface layer written in C is required, although the target function can be in virtually any language.
JAVA DATABASE ACCESS. The next session started with Yawn giving an admittedly shameless plug for a book he cowrote: "The Legacy Continues: Using the HP 3000 with HP-UX and Windows NT" because it has a good introduction to object-oriented concepts and terminology.
Java clients can access IMAGE/SQL or Allbase data by going through a JDBC-ODBC bridge. CSY has not yet looked at 'native' JDBC in enough detail to know what level of work would be involved in porting it. Yawn presented a very rudimentary TurboIMAGE package that uses Native Method Calls to access the TurboIMAGE intrinsics. He hopes to do further work on this package as time permits." [Editor's note: See "ADBC kit plugs IMAGE into Internet on 3000s" in our March issue. It talks about a product that can "read from and write to IMAGE databases using Java clients and Java Virtual Machine applications hosted on MPE/iX...skipping the IMAGE/SQL and ODBC overhead."]
ENHANCEMENT REQUEST BALLOT. The final effort of the SIG meeting was an enhancements request ballot. Results are shown below. The second column represents the number of attendees who ranked an item among their top three enhancement requests.
ITEM TOTAL VOTES TOP 3 JIT compiler 25 16 Native thread support 22 18 Official support for Java/iX 22 5 Remote debugging capability 20 6 TurboIMAGE package 18 7 MPE files package 18 4 CI runs Java directly 18 2 Intrinsic access package 16 3 CI access ( system() function ) 16 0 JDBC native on MPE 13 4 nonblock i/o on terminals 10 0 VPLUS package 5 0 Multicast sockets 3 0 Device control library (FCONTROL) 3 0 Ongoing AWT support 1 0
Roundtable Wrap Ups
I'll wrap up this report with some selected questions and answers
from HP
roundtables at IPROF. I've paraphrased the answers and identified who
answered for HP.
I'll begin with the MPE/HP Database Roundtable.
Q: What development efforts are taking place with IMAGE/SQL? (There was particular concern about the SQL optimizer.) Will there be other gateways in addition to Oracle?
Doug Meyers, Software Development Manager, CSY: We're primarily looking at defects. Recent fixes include outer joins, like predicates and update statistics (TPI).
Kriss Rant, Software Product Manager, CSY: Dollars are targeted to needs. There will probably be a gateway to Sybase.
Q: Will we ever get mirroring of system volumesets?
M. Gopalakrishnan, Customer Delight Solutions Manager, CSY: This is very difficult and HP has no plans to attempt it. The official recommendation is to use RAID devices. [Editor's note: at another session, HP announced a project to support redundant controllers on RAID devices with automatic failure rollover to enhance the high availability of RAID devices.]
Q: How important is MPE, IMAGE/SQL and Allbase to HP? How big is the installed base?
Larry Boyd, CSY Horizontal Solution Team Manager, and Kriss Rant): Very. It is a good business and is expected to remain a good business -- certainly large enough not to walk away from. The focus is the installed base plus certain vertical markets.
Q: What is the future of X.25 support and enhancements?
P. Suresh Kumar, Project Manager, ISO: No enhancements are planned, but support will continue.
Q: Does HP have any plans for database replication?
Larry Boyd and Kriss Rant: Shareplex/iX within the HP 3000 environment. HP has no plans for replication between Allbase(MPE/iX) and Allbase(HP-UX).
Q: When will ODBCLink SE be released?
Jon Bale, Database Development Manager, CSY: With MPE/iX 5.5 Express 3 in late summer and some yet to be determined vehicle for MPE/iX 5.0.
Q: Is anything being done about the problems caused by the Transaction Manager fixed-size buffer?
Larry Boyd: The Vertical Solutions Team is funding a project to examine this.
Q: The five-year software plan seems thin. What about it?
Kriss Rant: The greater than 4-Gb files is a major project. Other projects are being identified by the solution teams.
Q: What are the plans for improved NT interoperability? Will Samba be a product?
Alvina Nishimoto, R&D Program Manager, CSY: This is still being defined. We expect to go in the direction of productizing Samba but cannot commit to it at this time.
Q: What is the status of the Measurement Interface (MI)?
Kriss Rant:This has been taken off the price list. There are no plans to enhance it, but we will continue support.
The following questions came from the HP and Interex Management Roundtable.
Q: Why doesn't the database lab work with the HP 3000-L Internet list in the same way that the MPE lab does?
Winston Prather, HP 3000 R&D Manager: It works closely with the SIGIMAGE Executive Committee.
Q: What are you doing to get more HP 3000 customers?
Cathy Fitzgerald, Manager, CSY Marketing: We are working hard with existing solution providers.
Q: Can software support be customized by product?
Doug Blackwood, Product Marketing Section Manager, SSD: We have plans to do this. It should not be an issue by this time next year.
Q: What is the future of COBOL on the HP 3000?
Winston Prather: We are looking at this and working with SIGCOBOL to determine a strategy.
Q: Will the Price Guide ever be on the Web?
Cathy Fitzgerald: Yes, by summer.
Q: On developer support -- if MPE/iX is not going onto workstation hardware, what are you doing for the developer/consultant community?
Dave Snow, Planning Manager, CSY: We are looking at going to a 4-user and even possibly a 2-user license on the 918. Kris Rant will give an update to SIGConsult at HPWorld.
Q: Various funding models for "Roseville" were proposed by customers whose concern is that insufficient funds are being directed at development projects, compilers, etc.
Harry Sterling, General Manager, HP 3000 division: There followed an at times contentious discussion of the CSY business model. Few, if any, positions were changed. (For an expanded version of Sterling's answer, see the Q&A with him in our April issue.)