High-level access APIs in the OSIMIS TMN platform: Harnessing and hiding

Abstract

There is a common unjustified belief that OSI management technology, despite being very powerful, is difficult to implement because of the complexity of the underlying service/protocol (CMIS/P) and the power and expressiveness of the associated information model. Industry initiatives to standardise Application Program Interfaces (APIs) in this area have drawn the line too low. precisely at the management service level, resulting in the daunting XOM/XMP API. On the contrary, the OSIMIS TMN platform proposes much higher level APIs, both for realising new objects in agent applications and for accessing those objects in a distributed fashion. The latter are the Remote and Shadow MIB APIs and the concepts and rationale behind them are laid out while it is explained how object-oriented technology can be used to harness and hide, retaining at the same time the full power of the underlying infrastructure.