EVOLVING TO OBJECTS - THE WITCHES BREW

''Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble''... chant the witches of Macbeth. Take a corporation with a rich, decades- old history of providing on-line services on MVS mainframes, coupled w ith a vision of the future including OO design and programming, DCE fo r client-server infrastructure, heterogeneous platform mixes across th e Unix and PC worlds, and plan to tie that back to the established sys tems - and you have a Witches' Brew of your own. The question for our project has been ''How to introduce OO technology into an existing pro ject framework with the least effort and most benefit?''. Recent indus try experience reports detailing the blending of OO and DCE indicate t hat this has not been easy; our experience confirms that, but our appr oach has allowed us to utilize the strengths of OO to minimize the com plexities inherent in the mix.