News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 15

Insight Systems / Adaytum Software¶

Now available: APL Pipes ActiveX Client¶

For two years, APL Pipes has been used by customers across the world to connect APL systems together across TCP networks. APL Pipes has made it possible for APL systems from APL2000, Dyadic, IBM and Soliton to share data and make remote function calls to each other under Windows, OS/2 and Unix.

Now, we have added an ActiveX client to the family. This means that Visual Basic, Delphi, C++, Powerbuilder or just about any Windows development environment can join the party and be a client of APL-based servers. For example, the new Excel interface for our budgeting and planning application, Adaytum Planning, will use the ActiveX to make function calls to the Adaytum Planning engine.

The functionality of the APL Pipes ActiveX is similar to the DLL and OCX interfaces which are available for J and other APL products directly from the respective vendors. The difference is that the APL Pipes ActiveX works over the network without requiring Network OLE, and will support Unix, OS/2 or even Windows 3.1 servers in addition to Windows 95 and NT.

The APL Pipes ActiveX Client has been developed as a joint project between Insight Systems and Causeway Graphical Systems. In addition to the ActiveX, a simpler DLL version is also available. Both interfaces are available in 16- and 32-bit versions. At the time of sending this article to Vector, the ActiveX is in Beta Test; we expect it to be generally available in time for APL97.

Under Development: SQAPL Client Version 2.1¶

After numerous postponements, we have started work on a new version of the SQAPL or APL Link PRO Client. The list of features has not been set in concrete, but we expect that important new features will be support for a number of new ODBC calls: "ExecDirect", "GetInfo", "PutInfo" and "BrowseConnect". For advanced users, we will make the Environment, Connection and Statement handles available so that you can extend the product from APL by making direct DLL calls. We are also working on support for Bulk Input, but do not know yet that this can be included in version 2.1.

Adaytum Software¶

Picking up the theme for APL97, we are happy to share some success: The financial year 1996/1997 looks as if it will be another year of rapid growth for Adaytum. We are now established in the USA and our office in Minneapolis has grown to about 15 people in the first year. There are now more than 300 customers world wide. We have signed our first OEM agreement with a Canadian Data Warehouse vendor, and expect to open up several additional channels for distribution of our products during 1997. We expect to be recruiting a number of new developers, technical writers, designers and testers during the next year. If you have a knowledge of APL and C, and are willing to relocate to Denmark, please contact mkrom@adaytum.dk or check our Web site: www.adaytum.dk.

During the summer, we will release version 2.1 of our Windows product, which amongst other things contains support for text cells, annotation, audit trail, and support for larger models. Our Excel interface will make it possible to use our modelling engine from within the world’s most popular entry-level budgetting environment: the spreadsheet. A Lotus 1-2-3 interface is likely before year end, as is the release of our own Web server product.

Causeway Graphical Systems Ltd¶

Firstly, we would like to welcome Marc Griffiths to Causeway. As our NewLeaf users will know, Marc helped us out with the tutorial section of the manual, but they may not be aware of the number of small flaws and inconsistencies that he turned up (and got fixed) before the product went live. Marc has come to us with a long and successful history of APL development work on major systems, but he also brings a deep knowledge of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) principles, and an extreme thoroughness when it comes to the specification and testing of new software.

His arrival brings us close to our long-term goals in terms of team strength and skills base; we now have the ability to turn out professional code in all flavours of APL (including J), C++, Visual Basic for Applications and Java. We also have unparalleled experience in interface design, and Marc will continue his involvement in the world HCI community to ensure we stay with the leading edge, wherever it goes.

We are also delighted to announce that we have a begun a long-term development agreement with Adaytum KPS to provide them with development resource and design expertise. This was announced by their managing director in his keynote speech at this year’s Adaytum User Conference, as was the Excel interface to Adaytum Planning which was demonstrated in prototype form to considerable acclaim. This work is under the technical direction of Morten Kromberg, and we expect to work increasingly closely alongside Insight Systems, sharing expertise and development resource as the need arises.

We now have an immediate and urgent need for CausewayPro, as we are about to begin conversion of a very complex sales-forecasting application from mainframe APL*PLUS to Dyalog/W. As reported in the last Vector, the ‘engine room’ of CausewayPro is proving fast and reliable; the current task is completing the conversion of the class-library and subjecting the converted classes to the kind of comprehensive QA checks that they never had in the first place! Marc has already been a great help here, and we shall be mailing the first beta set to all our potential users at the end of the first week of July. If you want to know more about the ‘inside story’ of the way CPro works with Dyalog namespaces, you can read Duncan Pearson’s detailed technical description on page 94 in this Vector.

It is good to report that only very minor modifications were needed to allow our RainPro and NewLeaf namespaces to run on Dyalog/M on the Sun and RS/6000 platforms. This opens up the Unix market for us, but probably a better way of looking at it would be to say that it opens up the possibility of producing high-quality charts and reports to a very large base of existing Dyalog/M customers. As most of these sites already rely on PostScript printers, they will get the maximum benefit from Causeway’s PostScript approach with no change to their hardware or network setup. In order to check and support our software on the Unix platform, we will shortly be taking delivery of an RS/6000 machine running Dyalog/M.

We have recently issued an interim ‘bug fix’ release to both RainPro and NewLeaf which is posted on the web site as 4 passworded ZIP files. The RainPro release adds chart subheadings and multi-line X-Axis captions; the NewLeaf release simply consolidates all the fixes posted on the web site since September 1996. If you haven’t already updated your copy, you may download the new version (updated help file is included) and contact us for the password. If you don’t have internet access, mail or fax us and we will mail you a diskette free of charge.