Tcl-MCMIS: Interpreted Management Access Facilities

Abstract. Programming OSI management communications is considered daunting because of the complexity of the service/protocol (CMIS/P) and the lack of standardized high-level Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that can harness the power and hide the protocol and abstract syntax complexity. In the OSIMIS platform, high-level C++ APIs, namely the Remote MIB and Shadow MIB, are provided to support the construction of manager applications using object-oriented concepts. Despite this level of support, there are times when the application programmer needs to undertake rapid development away from the compiled approach, using only a simple scripting language. In OSIMIS, Tcl-MCMIS is one such scripting language extension to Tcl, realising an interpreted CMIS manager interface, which can easily be intermixed with the Tk widgets to construct management graphical user interfaces. This paper describes how Tcl-MCMIS is designed in a generic way using the existing APIs to retain the full power of the underlying protocol support.