March 22, 2017 conference call

[colancto]

The Methods & Tools Special Interest Group of O-LaN held a conference call on March 22, 2017. It was attended by Jasper van BATEN, Bill BARRETT, Krishna Murthy PENUKONDA, Michael HLAVINKA and myself. This conference call belongs to the actions of COBIA Phase II.
COBIA Phase II will deliver tools to developers in order to help them develop CAPE-OPEN PMEs and PMCs based on COBIA. This phase calls for a COBIA IDL to be developed and this development introduces a number of changes to the CAPE-OPEN specifications (while retaining the capability to interoperate between COM-based and COBIA-based software). The changes will be valdated by each SIG that controls the specific part of the CAPE-OPEN standard covered by these changes. In order to guide SIGs in their upcoming review, the Methods&Tools SIG is developing a document summarizing and rationalizing the changes. On March 22, 2017 he document was further progressed and its completion is expected by the end of March 2017.
The document covers general COBIA IDL aspects, choice of data types (reduced number compared to current standard leading to COM-based implementations), elimination of VARIANT in specification, persistence design, new CAPE-OPEN Parameter interface design (mostly to get rid of VARIANT), etc... COBIA development gives CO-LaN the opportunity to correct some flaws in CAPE-OPEN going from typos to exception handling (at least in one case).
The document being prepared may ultimately be publicly released but this has not been decided yet. Remember that COBIA is open sourced.