For implementing the QAF according to the principles outlined in section 2, we decided to use the IBM TMN Products ([8], [4]) as the development environment. They consist of two main components:
The NetView TMN Support Facility [7] encompasses a TMN management platform (OSF and WSF) and APIs for developing TMN applications. The product supports both M.3100 [1] and OMNIPoint [5] object models and provides all the necessary features for managing OSI/TMN compliant management agents.
The TMN WorkBench for AIX [9] provides the whole development environment. It consists of information modeling tools like MOC browsers and editors by which new MOCs can be derived from existing ones by drag-and-drop operations. For this purpose, a large number of standardized MOC catalogues is shipped in machine-readable form. TMN compliant agents are built by compiling the GDMO and ASN.1 definitions of the required MOCs into C++ class headers. The developer then only has the duty of implementing the behaviour of the managed objects by filling the provided callbacks with program code.
The main advantage of the IBM TMN development environment lies in a new C++/CMIP-API ([21], [2]) which is being standardized by the NM Forum: The developer is completely shielded from the complexities of the management protocol and is able to automatically generate C++ interfaces from GDMO managed object descriptions. It is even possible to automatically generate an agent executable directly from GDMO and ASN.1 documents which already contains the standardized generic behaviour descriptions. The developer has therefore only to cope with the implementation of the specific behaviour. In [19] a similar approach to a QAF for SNMP based on the OSIMIS management platform [24] is described.
The following sections will explain the influence of the IBM TMN development environment on the design and implementation of our solution. Our experiences with the IBM TMN products and off-the-shelf CORBA toolkits have shown that the development process of TMN agents is very similar to the way CORBA management agents are implemented.