Standards make changes, updates

The MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching) Forum and the FRF (Frame Relay Forum) have merged by unanimous vote to become the MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance. Visit www.mplsforum.org for more details.

The organizers of the DDS (Data Distribution Service) for Real-Time Systems recommended the specification for adoption at the April OMG (Object Management Group) Technical Meeting, and it was adopted this month. The DDS standard is a publish-subscribe communications model, unlike the traditional client-server model OMG's CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). In a client-server model, clients must bind to a server to change or access information. The publish-subscribe model is data-centric; objects on the network subscribe for periodic data updates and automatically receive information without directly requesting it. For more information, visit www.omg.org.

The SA (Service Availability) Forum released the AIS (Application Interface Specification) for standardizing the interface between SA Forum-compliant High Availability middleware and service applications, including an availability-management framework, check-pointing, event notification, messaging, cluster membership, and distributed locking. The AIS is available for downloading at www.saforum.org/specification.