Jacksonville, FL. Yesterday the OMG Architecture Board endorsed the new "Extensible Topics for DDS" Specification, a joint submission of Real-Time Innovations (RTI) and PrismTech. This specification adds several important capabilities to the DDS standard:

1. A more complete type system that supports:
   • The evolution and extension of the data-types used by an application while retaining interoperability with previous versions of those data types
   • The ability to indicate fields that are optional within a data type and need not be sent if there are not present.
   • A new associative "Map" type
   • A Bitmap type
   • The ability to specify values in enumerated types
2. New ways to describe data-types. In addition to IDL types can be described using XML or XSD
3. A standard representation for data-types that can be used to dynamically discover data-types on a network
4. Dynamic API for data and types that allow applications to interact with types that were not known at compile time or simply avoid the need for code generation.
5. A new XML-based encoding for data on the wire. Applications can now selectively choose for each data type whether to use a compact binary CDR format or an XML format.
6. An annotation language for IDL and XSD
7. A standard way to indicate which fields on a type shall be used for the "key"

Many of these features were already available in the RTI Data-Distribution Service implementation. Now there are standard API's for all of them.