News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 19

Kestrel Consulting¶

Our recruiting side is very active; handling both permanent and contract placements. We are always pleased to hear from people with strong technical APL skills, particularly when they are combined with sound business awareness and a grasp of the broader technical context within which APL exists. At the present moment we would be particularly interested to hear from people with up to five years of solid APL2; we are also placing people in areas other than APL, particularly the SAP package.

Consulting activities during the last quarter have included participation in a large-scale audit of APL use at a major British insurance company (more than 2000 workspaces on the mainframe). We have also been evaluating a comprehensive Decision Support System written in APL, and would be happy to discuss requirements with anyone having a particular interest in this sort of software.

The Kestrel Software Library was announced in the last issue and we have been (slowly) collecting software; anyone out there with APL tools and utilities which they would like to see distributed at low cost please contact us. Once again — the idea here is virtually a shareware one with Kestrel acting only as a central library. We are happy to distribute full-fledged commercial software as well of course, on a fully professional basis quite distinct from the Software Library..

Manugistics Inc¶

Manugistics has had a busy few months since the release of APL*PLUS II/386 Version 5.0 and APL*PLUS PC Version 11.

APL*PLUS II/386 Version 5.1 is now available and is generating a great deal of enthusiasm. Reviews and articles on application building have already started appearing in the US. Our customers are telling us that the improved developer tools and dramatic speedups are just what the doctor ordered.

On the UNIX front, Version 5 development is proceeding apace and we expect to be shipping well before the next issue of Vector reaches you. This release emphasizes code compatibility with APL*PLUS II/386, including the User Command Processor and the APL2-style language model.

Patrick Parks has certainly had a busy time recently. Not satisfied with being the chief developer of Version 5.1, he found time to make two trips to Europe. On the first one he presented a seminar to almost 200 people in Paris on APL*PLUS as a development language, emphasizing GUI and DDE. The next day offered an APLGUI internals class to a smaller, more technical audience. Less than a month later he was back, demonstrating the power of APLGUI to groups in Finland, Germany and the Netherlands. Chris Lee also made a similar presentation in Toronto, Canada in May.

As the APL*PLUS II release work quietens down, more and more of our attention is being devoted to the design and development of “INCA”. We have just finished a week of intensive design meetings which have given the developers plenty to do over the coming months. The most exciting thing about INCA is the frequent realization that programmers won’t have to resort to a lot of the convoluted coding tricks they had to use in a pure APL environment. The incessant chanting by the non-APL community is going to fade away once and for all!

As well as participating in APL93, Manugistics is holding its own User Conference here in Rockville. The conference will be on September 20th and 21st and features presentations, workshops and panels hosted by Manugistics developers and APL programmers as well as a special presentation by Dr Ben Shneiderman, a leading authority on User Design Interface Design. We hope to see some of you there. Immediately following the conference will be a three-day training course on building professional applications with APLGUI and APLDDE.

Something else we’re really excited about — the first APL*PLUS PC SE (Special Edition) book has been published. If you didn’t know, we introduced the SE as a way for authors and educators to provide a fully working version of APL*PLUS PC with their book or course work at no charge. Maurice Delois of Montreal, Canada has published “Introduction to APL*PLUS PC” which is available from EducAPL Inc., 1120 av du Parc, Quebec, Canada G1S 2W7. The price is $30 for 1-5 copies and $20 each for more than 5 (plus shipping). Each copy includes a disk with tutorial materials and a fully working copy of APL*PLUS PC. This has to provide the best available way for newcomers to learn APL. We invite others to take advantage of the SE program. Please contact us if you are interested.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

We are currently finishing off work on an upgrade to APL.68000, which should be complete by the time this issue of Vector appears. The upgrade is mainly devoted to removing those few bugs that have been reported in our Level II product — either in the original 68000-based version or some that were generated by the port to the RISC System/6000. Full details of the upgrade will be issued directly to registered users.

Our applications consultancy work continues to be almost entirely non-APL and, as mentioned in the last issue of Vector, we held a seminar in London at the end of April entitled ‘Developing Windows Applications’. This was held jointly with Maddox Ford Ltd and the principal speakers were Richard Nabavi of MicroAPL and Brian Drury of Maddox Ford.

Richard Nabavi opened the seminar by discussing the convergence of Client-Server computing with Graphical User Interfaces and outlined the various types of GUI development tools that are available — ranging from end-user enquiry applications through to simple tools like Visual BASIC and then on to the professional programming tools such as PowerBuilder. He illustrated his talk with various case studies that MicroAPL and Maddox Ford had been involved with. Brian Drury addressed the issue of managing GUI development projects and the lack of fully thought-out methodologies for GUI development.

The seminar concluded with the presentation of a checklist for the selection of GUI development products.

Dyadic Systems Ltd¶

Dyadic is delighted to announce excellent progress with the new Motif version of Dyalog APL (ingeniously code-named Dyalog APL/M) which, together with the latest release of Dyalog APL/W for MS-Windows will be the focus of the company’s exhibit at APL93 in Toronto. As many of you know, this “news” is written far ahead of publication date, so it is difficult to say how much of the port will be completed by August. However, by mid-June many of the GUI objects (FORMS, BUTTONS, etc. and even some graphical objects) were working. When complete, Dyalog APL/W workspaces developed under Windows on a PC will run unchanged under Motif on a UNIX workstation, such as the IBM RS/6000. This cross-platform portability will appeal to software developers wishing to market products to a wide cross-section of end-users.

At APL93, Dyadic will for the first time be hosting a number of third-party products developed for Dyalog APL/W. There will be several complete applications on show. The first of these is FREGI, an extremely powerful multi-dimensional planning and control system from Kunzle Planning Systems. The second application is JERRY, a decision-support system similar in concept to ADI, developed by Adviseurs in France. Finally, Dyadic will show an early version of a business graphics application produced by Greymantle Associates which aims to provide very high-quality hard-copy output in addition to the usual attractive screen presentation. All these products take full advantage of the Dyalog APL GUI support and are excellent examples of professional APL applications.

There will also be several add-on products that will appeal to the Dyalog APL developer community. GDDME from Lingo Allegro is a complete emulation of GDDM for Dyalog APL/W including full text and graphics support. It runs as a separate invisible task and is driven from APL by shared variables, just like AP126. This product enables you to port mainframe AP126 applications to Dyalog APL/W with only a few minor changes to the screen driving code. SQAPL is an extremely exciting product developed by Insight Systems in Denmark. It provides the mechanism for Dyalog APL applications to function as both clients and servers using SequeLink Client/Server Middleware from TechGnosis. In practical terms this allows your APL/W application to talk to most SQL databases running on any computer system to which your PC is networked. SQAPL also provided the capability for APL/W workspaces to offload computational and/or data retrieval tasks to Dyalog APL running on a more powerful UNIX server. In short — true client/server computing for APL. Finally, Dyadic will be demonstrating Adrian Smith’s superb presentation graphics package which has already been adopted for a Dyalog APL/W Executive Information System developed in Finland.

If you will not have the opportunity to view these products yourself at APL93, please call Dyadic for details.

Dyadic is also pleased to announce an implementation of Dyalog APL for the DEC Alpha AXP running OSF/1. With a SPECmark92 rating of up to 160 (Intel claims 64.5 for a 66MHz Pentium) the DEC Alpha promises to push the level of performance of an APL workstation even further towards mainframe capability, and perhaps even beyond.

Soliton Associates Limited¶

Soliton Associates Limited is a newly established software company which has acquired assets related to the APL software business from Reuters Information Services (Canada) Limited. Soliton Associates now owns the right to develop, market, sell and support SHARP APL and the application software products: VIEWPOINT, an end-user reporting facility; MAILBOX, an electronic mail system; and LOGOS, a development environment for APL applications.

SHARP APL was originally developed in the 1970s by I.P. Sharp Associates. It is both a powerful computer language and a high-performance computing environment, supporting high-availability, multi-user, shared-data applications on mainframes and workstations using client-server technology.

Soliton Associates supplies its products and services worldwide and has assumed full responsibility for existing international SHARP APL customers, which include Reuters. President, Clarke Bruce, says “Soliton Associates is focused on continued development of SHARP APL and on the development of new products and new markets that will allow it to become a more broadly based software company.”

Soliton Associates employees represent collectively over 250 years of SHARP APL business and technical experience. Clarke Bruce says “The company is committed to continuing the heritage of quality products and services from Reuters and I.P. Sharp Associates.” The Soliton Associates management team managed the APL business within Reuters, and includes: President, Clarke Bruce; Marketing and Sales, Nancy Lamb; Research and Development, Mike Symes; Software Manufacturing and Support, Margot Tate; and Finance and Accounting, Robert Duncan. The company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices in Rochester, USA; Coventry, England; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Product announcements from Soliton Associates for the 3rd and 4th quarters 1993 include new releases of SHARP APL for UNIX, MVS-to-UNIX connectivity products and interfaces for the MVS and UNIX environments. SHARP APL Version 21 for MVS is scheduled for general distribution in the 1st quarter 1994.

APL93, the 1993 International Conference on APL, will be held in Toronto on August 15-19, 1993. Soliton Associates is active in the organisation of the conference, with Elena Anzalone as Proceedings Editor, Kirk Iverson as Software Exchange Coordinator, and Larry Moore as Conference Chairman. Don’t miss Soliton Associates’ booth and forum at APL93.

The Soliton Associates head office will relocate in Toronto in July 1993. New telephone numbers were not available at the time of writing. Mainframe development activities were recently relocated from the Reuters Toronto Data Centre to a new site in the Toronto area.

For information about Soliton Associates products and services contact Laurie Howard, Soliton Associates Ltd, Amsterdam, Tel +31 20 570 8733, Fax +31 20 570 8758, or Nancy Lamb, Soliton Associates Incorporated, Rochester, USA, Tel +1 716 256 6466, Fax +1 716 256 6469.