This was our first meeting as a Task Force! It was an excellent meeting, and here's a brief synopsis.

1-RFPs and RFCs Issued:

• We issued two new RFPs:
• High Performance enablers: an RFP to modify CORBA to remove barriers to the use of current and next generation high performance hardware.
• LightWeight Services: an RFP requesting lightweight versions of three services that are important for embedded systems (Naming, events, and time).
• We recommend an RFC for a lightweight logging service to be opened for comments. If there are no substantive comments in 90 days, the service will be adopted.

2-Submissions: MARS

• We supported three submissions in MARS:
• Online upgrades was recommended for adoption. This supports both hot updates of replicas, and of non-replicated servers.
• We reviewed load balancing and extensible transports, and extended their revised submission date to Helsinki.

3-Submissions: RTESS

• We reviewed the initial submissions (in RTESS) for synthesis of Real-time CORBA with RTWJ and the RT Core extensions. Revised submissions are due in Washington.
• We also moved the RT Notification Technology Adoption from MARS to RTESS. Revised submissions are due in Helsinki.

4-Other activities.

• We hosted an excellent panel of implementors of the fault tolerance spec. At this time there are 5 groups who have implemented, or are implementing this spec, and three of them were on our panel. It appears that we have some work to do to adapt this spec for embedded and real-time systems.
• Our fault tolerance group restarted, now that we have several implementations of the spec. Our goals are to extend the spec for embedded systems, real-time use, and to add support for the Simplex technology developed at CMU.
• We had a very short session on new approches to embedded ORBs, and will have to continue that discussion at the upcoming meetings.
• We hosted our 4th (and final) high confidence / safety critical software focus session. We also had a presentation on a promising techology for software scan testing, and a presentation of the Rockwell Collins response to the safety critical RFI. We now have a roadmap for potential work in this important area.
• We started our work on adding QoS/timeliness support to web services. There is a consensus that this is a CRITICAL area, but that it will be difficult to find a good way to impact the products. Out first step will be to host a half day discussion of user requirements in Washington later this year.

5-External activities: The Open Group is having a session on real-time aggregated systems at their July meeting in Boston. This session will include presentations from system integrators (what we don't know how to do, what we need to integrate multi-technology real-time systems) and vendors (partial solutions that exist). Based on this meeting, The Open Group may initiate a project (challenge) in this area, which would be an excellent opportunity for closer OMG/Open Group cooperation. OMG members get a discounted rate for Open Group meetings, if you are interested.
 

The Helsinki meeting will be pretty full, since we're going to drop the Sunday session for this meeting. Hope to see you there!

Your chairs,
Dock and Ben