ANDF Kit version 2 available from OSF

DRA and OSF-RI are pleased to announce version 2 of the ANDF Kit program.
It consists of distribution and support for an "ANDF Kit" for people
interested in investigating the ANDF technology. The rest of this article
provides more information about the program, including:


1. An overview on the technology.


2. A description of the ANDF Kit.


3. What is new in the ANDF Kit version 2.


3. How to get information about ANDF.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-


1. Overview of the technology.


      ANDF has proven to be a very versatile technology. OSF-RI and DRA,
      as well as other collaborators around the world, have made numerous
      advances through use of ANDF. Up to now the technology has proven
      to be very useful in the following areas:


        a. For developing and testing portable software (the ANDF
              technology requires conformance to API specifications, so it
              also serves as a good portability checker).


        b. As an open compiler technology (a baseline for developing a
              compiler family). In particular for new non-interpretive
              languages, portable compilers may find ANDF a preferable
              intermediate language than say C source code.


        c. For software distribution (the original ANDF objective).


        d. As a more formal, and machine manipulable, way of expressing
              the static aspects of APIs.


      We also foresee interesting usages in the following areas:


        e. ANDF as a representation of parallel programs.


        f. As a format to represent and manipulate code in CASE tools.


      DRA and OSF-RI wish to encourage other investigations from the rest
      of the international research community.




2. The ANDF Kit


      The ANDF Kit V2.0 contains a set of installers for the following
      platforms : intel 486/SCO, sparc/Solaris, sparc/SunOS and PA-RISC/
      HP-UX. DRA's C producer is provided in ANDF format (an installer
      must be installed before installation of the C producer).


      The purpose of this kit is to allow those interested in ANDF to
      have a "hands-on" experience with the technology. It is intended to
      serve a number of purposes:


        - To promote further experimentation with ANDF in the research and
            educational community, especially for experimental languages or
            hardware.


        - To help application developers understand how to utilize the
            portability and checking features of the ANDF technology to
            facilitate application porting to a variety of platforms with a
            common API.


        - To help compiler developers understand the inner workings of the
            ANDF technology, in order to determine the effort required to
            adapt an existing compiler implementation to support the ANDF
            "language" as described in the ANDF specification, whether the
            implementation is a language front-end or a code generator.


      This release of the ANDF Kit is completed by a new release
      of the GANDF technology developed by the OSF RI. The GANDF technology
      is a family of ANDF installers which utilize the GCC code generators,
      thus enlarging the base of supported platforms and demonstrating the
      possibility for ANDF to take advantage of existing compiler back-end
      technology. This new GANDF release is compatible with TDF spec
      level 3.0 and supports the following platforms: i486 SCO ODT 3.0,
      DEC Alpha OSF/1 1.3 and 2.0, PA-RISC HP-UX 9.0x, RS/6000 AIX 3.2 and
      SPARC SunOS 4.1.2.




      Due to the proprietary nature of part of this software, an ANDF
      Cooperative Research Agreement must be signed prior to receiving
      the software. The ANDF Cooperative Research Agreement is available
      electronically via the Web or from the OSF RI anonymous FTP server
      at:


ftp://riftp.osf.org/pub/andf/ANDF.CooperativeResAgreement.ps


      Send completed agreements, including the questions in Appendix B,
      to:


ANDF License Administrator
OSF Research Institute
11 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
U.S.A.


      Pricing for the ANDF research Kit is based on organization type.
      The kit is for non-commercial use only. Fees are principally to
      offset the cost of preparation and distribution of the kit
      materials, plus the administration of the ANDF Cooperative Research
      Agreements.


      Pricing is as follows:


OSF Members: $ 500.00
Non-Members: $1000.00
Universities: $ 200.00


      A freely distributable subset of the ANDF Kit (Driver, Linker, and
      GANDF installers) is also available via anonymous FTP in the
      directory:


ftp://riftp.osf.org/pub/andf/ANDF.kit


      No DRA licensed code is included in this subset, so no Cooperative
      Research Agreement with DRA is required. This subset allows users to
      experiment with installing applications distributed in ANDF, such
      as Mosaic, which will also be available via anonymous FTP. Other
      applications may be posted from time to time. Their availability
      will be announced in the ANDF home page.




3. What is new about the ANDF Kit version 2


      The version 2 of the ANDF Kit is based on the latest release by DRA
      named TDF-95-06-12. The differences with version 1 of the Kit are:


      - The MIPS installer has been replaced with an installer for the
          PA-RISC installer. This does not mean that support for the MIPS
          architecture has been discontinued by DRA, but that we believe
          that a PA-RISC installer is of more interest for the research
          community. Other installers are available directly from DRA for
          DEC Alpha, RS/6000, SGI MIPS and MIPS Ultrix and Intel on Unixware,
          Linux and Solaris.


      - All the installers delivered in this Kit pass OSF's AVS (ANDF
          Validation Suite) successfully, bringing the ANDF technology to
          level of quality never attained before.


4. How to get ANDF Information and Documentation


      There is now an ANDF home page located on the OSF RI World Wide Web
      server at URL:


http://riwww.osf.org:8001/andf/index.html


      Here you will find a brief overview of ANDF, additional information
      about OSF experience with ANDF, as well as pointers to a collection
      of ANDF-related papers which may be either viewed on-line or printed.
      All of the papers from the "ANDF Technology Collected Papers" series,
      currently four volumes, are contained on the server.


      For those who are not Mosaic users, the ANDF papers may also be
      obtained from the OSF RI anonymous FTP server:


ftp://riftp.osf.org/pub/andf_coll_papers


      Requests for ANDF information may be sent to andf-tech-request@osf.org.




--
eric ivanov@gr.osf.org Open Software Foundation Research Institute
tel +33 76634896 2 avenue de Vignate
fax +33 76510532 38610 Gieres FRANCE


--

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