mrose@CHEETAH.CA.PSI.COM (Marshall Rose) (10/30/90)
ISODE 7.0 is tentatively scheduled to come out some time in January of '91 with a freeze of late November is anticipated. As with the 6.0 release, the major emphasis has been on the OSI Directory implementation. In addition to performance tuning, bug fixes, and plugging memory leaks, there has also been a significant bit of work in integrating applications into using the Directory for naming. (Work leading to 6.0 was focused primarily on white pages applications, there has still been a lot of work in this area, too.) In 7.0 there will be a new transport listener, iaed. When it starts, it will contact the Directory, look in the local portion of the DIT, and find the application entities that should be made available. It then listens on the presentation addresses for those entities. When an incoming connection arrives, a command string is executed to deal with the connection. All this information is stored in the Directory, so there is no longer any "local" (aka UNIX filesystem) configuration information which is consulted. Similarly, when an initiator in 7.0 wishes to establish an association, it will use the Directory to find the presentation address, e.g., typing ftam cs,ucl,gb will find you the filestore service for the CS department at UCL in GB. Of course, you can configure things to use the Directory, or not, depending on your site requirements. Obviously, the ISODE development people prefer that you do use the Directory... /mtr