Interface management: a CORBA universal service manager

The Universal Service Manager (USM) is a Concept Exploration Prototype whose goal is to help the Defence Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment reach its important objective of high levels of interoperability and compatible communications between systems. The USM provides a unified interface to a set of interfaces in a subsystem to make the interfacing between many modules or classes more manageable. That is, the USM middleware provides a single interface class for a client to access a small collection of subclasses, making calls to a lower tier (the legacy database systems) more efficient most of the time. The USM must support general-purpose Human User Interface (HUI) functionality, as well as granular detail operations for workflow specific functionality. The USM acts like a view manager on the server side for handling client displays and maintaining user profiles. Recognizing that incompatible solutions abound today for request generation, a component design is an attractive and fairly non-disruptive alternative for distributed, inter-domain management. One impact, as opposed to using other styles, is the reduction in coding effort because the legacy systems will exchange legacy managed information, and only participate minimally in maintenance of the new meta data for service management.