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Bytesmiths and
Telecommunications
The Bytesmiths principal, Jan
Steinman, is intensively involved in the rapidly growing field of
object-oriented telecommunications monitoring, control and
provisioning software. His hardware background, modelling and
communications work, and large-system
Smalltalk experience combine well to meet the rigorous demands of
this field.
Network Management Systems
In 1992, Bytesmiths began a large
telecom project for a 20,000 employee Swiss company and their large
Swedish and American business partners. This project used nine
Smalltalk developers (most of whom had a few months or less Smalltalk
experience), to build a graphical public switching network management
system for Signalling System 7 configuration management, planning,
fault analysis, and performance monitoring at the MTP level.
Signalling points, link sets, and routes are depicted graphically,
their status updated in real time. Correlated views condense tens of
megabytes of information into easily identifiable fault patterns for
simplified diagnosis and speedy repair. Logging and auditing
functions enable replay of "event storms" for later detailed
analysis. Off-line models provide the tools needed for network
planners to simulate expected performance.
Jan served as joint technical lead on this project, providing
mentoring and classroom training, overall system architecture, design
and methodology support, establishing procedures and conventions, and
serving on the corporate re-use board. He also produced most of the
critical re-use quality code in the system, which enabled other, less
experienced developers to rapidly produce a variety of user
interfaces.
Bytesmiths built the planning system, which enables
national PTT planners to simulate future network configurations
before actual implementation, and also served as primary system
integrator, and also architected a complete re-write of the graphical
user interface. Jan designed and implemented the domain model, which
provides the core functionality of the entire system.
This project makes heavy use of distributed processing, RPC and
OSI communications, and RDBMS, OODBMS, and proprietary database
techniques. It is implemented in VisualWorks
® 1.0 under ENVY ®.;
Toolsets and frameworks used include HotDraw,
Sybase ®, and
Bytesmiths ' own fast, XDR-compliant
object serializer/deserializer. This
system has been deployed for field trials for at least three national
telephone systems.
Element Management Systems
Bytesmiths recently performed similar tasks for a
Canadian networking company, this time at the element management
level. Important features of the 45020
Node Manager® are HP OpenView ®
integration, rapid support of new equipment types, and the ability to
install new or updated equipment types in a running system.
All this was accomplished via a
Bytesmiths -trained team of six (none
of whom had more than a month of Smalltalk experience), implementing
a Bytesmiths -designed architecture
featuring a dynamic schema, transparent object distribution, a fully
automatic GUI generator, and schema modelling aids. (The system being
phased out required re-compilation of the entire 1,000,000 line
system in order to add new equipment types.) This project was begun
in September 1994, and successfully entered field trials in July
1995.
This element manager is built in VisualWorks 2.0
under ENVY , using SNMP ,
TCP/IP , HP OpenView ,
Informix ®, and
Bytesmiths ' object
serializer/deserializer under Solaris and
Motif .