Evolving to Objects - The Witches' Brew

Abstract

"Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble" … chant the witches of Macbeth. Take a corporation with a rich, decades-old history of providing on-line services on MVS mainframes, coupled with a vision of the future including OO design and programming, DCE for client-server infrastructure, heterogeneous platform mixes across the Unix and PC worlds, and plan to tie that back to the established systems - and you have a Witches' Brew of your own. The question for our project has been "How to introduce OO technology into an existing project framework with the least effort and most benefit?". Recent industry experience reports detailing the blending of OO and DCE indicate that this has not been easy; our experience confirms that, but our approach has allowed us to utilize the strengths of OO to minimize the complexities inherent in the mix.