Resumen
The article focuses on the San Francisco project, a business process software for distributed object applications, which offers developers extendable components to simplify the transition to distributed, easily customizable applications. It was started when several business partners of the software company IBM Corp. asked for help in modernizing their application products which were typically written in procedural languages, such as RPG or Cobol. While most approaches to object-oriented design assume the result of the process as a finished application that is used in the operation of a business, the San Francisco project has a different design goal. It is not intended to be a finished application. It is rather, a starting point for an application developer and is intended to be modified. The design process was begun by capturing the requirements for the vertical domain that were being examined. Further, the San Francisco project is building three layers of reusable code for use by application developers with the top layer consisting of business process components for key business activities, the second providing definitions of commonly used business objects that can be used as the base for interoperability between applications, and the third layer provides the infrastructure and services required to build industrial-strength applications using distributed, managed objects on multiple platforms.