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Plenty in store for the IBM repository
Source: Computing Canada Published: Feb 1990
When IBM Corp. announced its intention to enter the computer-aided software engineering (CASE) market last September, the move was based on a forthcoming set of products and an environment called Application Development/Cycle (AD/Cycle). Speculation about what this environment will involve, including a concept called Repository Manager, has kept the industry buzzing.
“The big problem we have today is that IBM hasn’t dropped the other shoe yet — they told us what the framework’s going to look like, but they haven’t told us how it’s actually going to work,” said Ken Orr, a principal in the Ken Orr Institute. “And in fact, until they give us the data models we’re not going to know.” Speaking at The Repository Conference sponsored here last month by Digital Consulting Inc. of Andover, Mass., Orr described IBM’s software strategy as “a new generation of software,” a major component of which will be something called a repository. “There are a variety of bases on which (the repository) is a very important component in the software technology of the future,” he commented. “There are plans long-term for the repository to go into the execution and operation of data processing.”
Speaker George Schussel, DCI president, described a repository as a “database of meta-data (data about data) — a database for all the things that are necessary to build programs in an application generation platform.” According to Schussel, a repository will offer the same capabilities as current databases — reusability, concurrency, multiple availability, management — but instead of applying them to an execution environment, the repository will operate in the development environment. It will contain things like object definitions, conceptual data models, process logic, screens and reports, and source code.
