Speedware goes Visual
for 3000, Unix, NT
4GL supplier Speedware announced a Visual Speedware product at the
recent HP World conference, a client-server
development package that combines a PC GUI with what the company calls "a
renewed investment for HP 3000 customers." The
company made note of a Visual Speedware success story from Merkantildata
Applikation AB, the third largest computer
company in the Nordics. The firm markets an MRP II application to hundreds
of customers which runs on MPE/iX and HP-UX,
and the company migrated the application to Visual Speedware including 100
screens and all menus. The effort took two
programmer months, and Merkantildata estimated the migration would have
taken two years without Visual Speedware.
According to Stefan Lundquist at Merkantildata, "at run time as little database information as possible is transferred to the client, thereby greatly increasing performance, which is required for mission-critical applications such as ours." Transferring as little information as possible to clients was once a standard practice in computing, of course, before the advent of graphical interfaces and fat clients. Now it appears that tools like Visual Speedware, integrated with Visual Basic 5.0 at Merkantildata, provide a way to reinstate such sound practices of the past while using Visual Basic with the HP 3000.
918DX bundle swells
with more tools
HP can hardly stop the bandwagon from racing along for its Series
918DX HP 3000 developer's bundle, set to start
shipping this month. In the two-plus months since the package was
announced, 19 vendors have agreed to supply software
either free or at a fraction of regular cost to developers buying the
918DX. The most recent list of solutions available only to
new developers of software for sale on the HP 3000 includes the following:
With all this bounty available at a fraction of its regular cost, the software end of the 918DX might turn out to be the greatest bargain of the hardware-software package. To get yours you need to be working on new, commercial 3000 software. Contact steven_little@hp.com for more details on the 918DX.
Bradmark readying
Year 2000 utilities
Bradmark's HP 3000 R&D chief Jerry Fochtman offered an update on
the company's project to add Year 2000
capabilities to the DBGENERAL product. Portions of the functionality are
scheduled to move into beta testing in the DBGENERAL
customer base later this month, with anticipated customer shipments of this
7.2 version around the beginning of 1998.
SHOWOUT solution
surfaces as freeware
Coast Community College's Mark Bixby, fast becoming a serious
source of MPE/iX operating system software in his own
right, has managed to provide a solution for one of the longer-standing
SIGMPE System Improvement Committee requests. The
SIG has long carried a request for an MPE feature that provides :SHOWOUT
percentage-done information, a need that climbed as
high as the SIG's number two request in 1996.
Bixby wrote a solution of his own that does just that, executed as a Pascal program that can be run from the colon prompt. He says, "It looks for output spooler processes and then reports various status things, including percent-complete, and it uses AIFs when doing the PRIV-mode work." Source and binary code for the solution, which runs on both MPE/iX 5.0 and 5.5, is available on the Web. Bixby, who got an HP 3000 loaned to him by CSY earlier this year while developing a DNS solution for MPE/iX, said he wrote the :SHOWOUT software when "our operators wanted to know how much longer certain monster print jobs were going to be printing."
Patch extends MPE filenames, adds eval functions
HP's Jeff Vance, one of the hardest working members of the MPE
Command Interpreter team, recently posted a patch
on CSY's Jazz Web site site that adds lots of new functionality to file
naming and evaluator functions. MPEJXQ1 allows POSIX and
MPE_Escaped filenames to contain all printable characters except for "/",
"\", space, comma, semicolon and equal sign. The
patch also contains the long-anticipated LISTF,access and "PAUSE for a job"
enhancements -- as well as COPY enhancements
and two features you'd have to wait for MPE/iX 6.0 to see:
Mitchell Humphrey
hits 20, adds NT
While marking its 20th anniversary, Mitchell Humphrey & Co. (314.991.2440)
noted that they've
released a Windows NT version of their FMS II financial management
application. Only a handful of companies have logged two
decades of continuous time providing HP 3000 software -- Robelle and M.B.
Foster Associates are two others that come to
mind. Few are delivering an application on three platforms including MPE.
Like the MPE/iX version of the product, FMS II on
NT has a Windows-based interface. It uses Microsoft's SQL Server, and a NT
version that uses Oracle will be available soon as
well.