First Name : Jun

Last Name : Nitta

Title : Senior Engineering Manager

Company : Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc.

Address : Reservoir Place, 1601 Trapelo Road

City : Waltham

State : MA

Mail Code : Telephone : 781-890-0444

FAX : 781-487-9563

E-mail : nitta@hi.com

Cyberpaper : Business of our TP Monitor running on UNIX and Windows NT boxes (OpenTP1) had finally got a real momentum in mid 1990s in Japanese market. It was the time to look for a new direction and we started to develop OTS at the beginning of 1995 thinking that application productivity brought by distributed OO technology would be crucial to next generation OLTP products. We could have just implemented CORBA interface on top of existing OpenTP1 engine but we didn’t do that and implemented it in a pure CORBA way because we believed the eclectic approach would go away quickly from the marketplace as relational view on old CODASYL DBMS did.

Like in the early days of OpenTP1 business, few users dared to deploy new CORBA Transaction Manager (TPBroker). So we tried to develop some application systems by ourselves. In 1996 we developed business-to-consumer electronic commerce server. We combined dynamic HTML generation mechanism to back-end business logic implemented as CORBA objects. In 1997 we added more complex business logic and security features to it for business-to-business environment. Most customer sites were at the trial stage then, so urgent scalability issues did not arise.

Meanwhile we recognized the importance of asynchronous and guaranteed messaging capability and developed CORBA notification service with transactional QoS in 1998. At the same time we refurbished our workflow engine to be equipped with CORBA interface and more dynamic flow control capability. We also developed load balancing and connection funneling subsystem for better scalability.

We are now integrating these parts into an EAI product with a flavor of component oriented features(EJB). Several real customer projects deploying these OO technologies are expected to start this year. Key feature will be a business process definition tool integrated with other functionality such as adapters and data conversion.