HP proposes Java Visage as new 3000 GUI

Built-in tools to give applications a graphical interface; Legacy/J’s Blue/J tapped as development tool

HP took its first steps toward a new HP 3000 look and feel at HP World, announcing its Visage plan to provide a graphical user interface for MPE/iX applications.

The plan, which HP officials said is still open to change, will make use of the Java Foundation Classes to give 3000 programs an interface that can be run from inside any Web browser that supports Java. HP engineers Bill Bennett and Mike Yawn of the Commercial Systems Division (CSY) outlined Visage at an HP World ’99 session.

“We were trying to look very broadly at user interface strategy for the HP 3000, and we felt like Java was a way to go, if not the best way to go,” Yawn said. “We wanted to enable people to do Java-based front ends that work well with the 3000.”

HP is also outlining a migration path from VPlus interfaces to a Java interfaces as part of its Visage strategy. “If you’re starting from scratch, a lot of the tools are the same,” Yawn said. The migration of VPlus screens as well as creation of new Java screens will take place with the PC-based toolkit Blue/J from Legacy/J (www.legacyj.com). This graphical application painter, a $500-per-seat stand alone product, is used at design time to offer a palette of tools for creating elements such as check boxes and radio buttons.

“The neat thing about [Visage] being Java-based is that its tool palette is extensible — it’s not just coming with a hard-coded set of things from a vendor,” Yawn said. Visage makes Java Beans — software components which are Java classes for APIs, binding and bridging, event handling and persistent storage — a tool 3000 developers can use in programs.

Java Beans from around the world will be able to be integrated with HP 3000 applications. As an example, a Bean from Apple Computer has been tested to let 3000 applications run QuickTime movies. HP is moving forward with MPE Class Libraries for Java, planning to offer data-aware Beans which “know how to go out and pull data back from a TurboIMAGE database,” Yawn said, “so you could use the data to populate a pick list.”

3000 developers can also create Beans using client-based Java development suites for their own specific application functionality, which can be placed in the palette. At HP World, CSY positioned Blue/J as the first client-based tool for Visage. The software includes an input filter to process VPlus forms files and listings created from forms files.

“It will suck that whole thing up and give you a screen that looks just like a VPlus screen,” Yawn said, “and then you can turn those components into checkboxes and buttons and menu bars. It’s extensible, so you can make it do even more things that we’ve never even dreamed of.”

The Java code generated by Blue/J runs on Java clients. At HP World CSY demonstrated such code running on an Apple iMac as a test of the portability of the Java front-ends. At runtime HP is using an intercept library, “so no matter what language you wrote your application in, when it calls a VPlus API we intercept that call and end up in Java code doing the exact same thing,” Yawn said. HP has created a Java implementation of VSHOWFORM and other VPlus intrinsics.

HP can extend Visage to bring 3000 information into Java clients. New VPlus intrinsics may show up over time, Yawn added. “We talked about populating a combo box under the control of the client,” he said. “We might decide to expose that to the server, and allow there to be something like a VLISTBOX intrinsic that allows you to pass things down to the client.”

This kind of functionality is supplied through Java class libraries for MPE, software which is part of the new shared source program that HP is operating in conjunction with Interex. HP can make this shared source can be integrated into the standard MPE distribution, but at first the class libraries are available on the CSY Jazz Web server.

HP hasn’t made its class libraries an officially supported product yet. “We’re looking for user feedback on [turning them into products],” Yawn said. Options would be paying HP support for the product, or making the Java class components a separate product. “For the business model we’re not ready to make any announcement yet, but these are the different flavors we’re thinking about.”

Yawn said HP will be posting Web pages on Visage details, with links from the CSY Jazz site.