News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 22

Kestrel Consulting¶

Kestrel Consulting combines the recruiting and entrepreneurial skills of Mark Harris (known to many British APL Association members from Kestrel Executive Selections) with the technical experience of Dick Bowman (former chairman of the British APL Association and presently a member of the ACM SIGAPL Executive Board).

Kestrel’s objectives are two-fold.

The recruitment side of the company will continue to concentrate on specialist recruitment and placement of both permanent and contract staff, not only in APL but also in other focussed markets. Our aim is for our recruitment and placement services to operate globally. At the present time we have a very high demand for APL contract staff for the USA, and an equal if not greater demand for contractors with SAP experience. We intend to provide the very highest possible levels of service both to the individuals and to the employers.

On the technical side we view the introduction of GUI systems as an excellent opportunity for APL to re-establish itself as the high-productivity solution of preference. Our technical consultants have worked on hardware from the IBM PC right through to the largest mainframes, with operating systems from MSDOS to MVS/TSO, with software from Multimate to DB2, and on applications from accounting to zymurgy.

One of the means by which we aim to increase the amount of effective use of APL is widespread adoption of standardised tools and utilities; an initial step along this path is the Kestrel Software Library which is currently collecting software. If you have any software related to APL which you’d like to see widely distributed please contact us. Our emphasis is on wide distribution of low cost software; we are collecting now and plan to begin distribution in mid-1993.

Whether your needs are temporary hiring of maintenance programmers, custom development using an entire project team, consultancy and training, or any aspect of APL-related computing, Kestrel Consulting is only a telephone call, fax or email message away.

Manugistics Inc¶

Here at Manugistics we’ve just come back from the U.S. Software Developers Conference, held every year just outside San Francisco. Bill Gates and Philippe Kahn were there, showing off their latest labour-saving devices for Windows programmers. We were there too, introducing a lot of ‘C++’ and Visual Basic fans to the concept of Array Programming. Now that APL*PLUS works in Windows and talks to databases and other applications, we’re turning a lot of heads — some “I haven’t used APL for twenty years” folk, and quite a few “What is this APL stuff anyway?” types. It seems that even with all the promises (“Now you can build applications without writing a line of code!”), nobody else has a good solution to ad hoc problem-solving or complex data analysis. We are greatly encouraged by this state of affairs and will be pushing hard this year to open new doors and new minds to the power of APL.

Back in Rockville, we have just experienced a surge in sales as our year drew to a close at the end of February. APL*PLUS II Version 5.0 was so successful that we ran out of our (anticipated) six months of stock less than three months after we started shipping. The release of APL*PLUS/PC Version 11 was also responsible for a big boost as customers rushed to get their hands on the Runtime Binder so they can start sharing and selling their applications.

As you may be aware, the only way we could get APL*PLUS II Version 5.0 out to the public was to lock the developers in a closet. The trouble with developing for Windows is that every neat new thing you add makes you realize there are three other things that would make it really, really neat. When you stay up all night to sneak those three in, there are, you guessed it, nine more the next afternoon when you get up. Well, as we expected, the developers broke out of the closet fairly quickly and have been working hard to get Version 5.1 ready. The development work is now nearly done and we are having a great time building 3-D forms with icons and bitmaps and graphic buttons and drawing pictures and using the vastly improved Wed form design tool and... ...and you’ll have to wait for the rest. Actually, by the time you read this, we should be almost ready to start shipping!

In and around the work on Version 5.1, the team is working hard on preparing the next release of APL*PLUS II for UNIX. Version 5 will include the APL2 features we have put into the 386 product and the ]User Command Processor as well as a lot of improvements and speed-ups. Release is planned for the summer.

With 5.1 finished, our Windows team can concentrate its design and development efforts on our “third generation” APL*PLUS system, code-named INCA. This project is generating a great deal of discussion, white-board wizardry, project journal writing and feature prototyping, but is still a way away from “Now Appearing on a Hard Disk Near You.” As many of you will have heard or read, it will include Object-Oriented Extensions, Control Structures and an Alternative to Funny Characters. Stay tuned to this space for more details.

As you can see, we’re doing everything we can to keep APL alive and growing well into the next century. Help us (and yourselves) by introducing (or re-introducing) your friends and colleagues to the new generation of APL!

MicroAPL Ltd¶

On the APL front, much of our development work is aimed at the summer. We have, however, now completed the Macintosh version of our MicroPLOT business graphics software — PLOTMAC. Our MicroPLOT software is designed to facilitate the quick and easy production of business graphics. In common with all our GUI APLs, APL.68000 for the Macintosh includes an interface to the native graphics facilities but up to now the user will have had to write his or her own scaling routines to produce sensible, labelled, graphs.

The Quickdraw colour graphics available on the Macintosh offers the typical primitive graphics routines that one expects as standard — line drawing; shape drawing; pattern selection; fill routines; graphics text and so on. The MicroPLOT routines allow an APL programmer to set up a labelled graph via cover functions for the Mac Quickdraw routines. The PLOTMAC code is compatible with our MicroPLOT software for other systems such as the RISC System/6000 or for plotting devices such as Hewlett Packard plotters.

Registered Mac users will have received separate notification about the PLOTMAC software, but further details are available from MicroAPL.

Much of our consultancy work in recent months has been involved with producing Windows applications and we have scheduled another free seminar for the end of April 1993 entitled ‘Developing Windows Applications’. This seminar is being jointly hosted by MicroAPL and Maddox Ford and will cover many of the practical problems encountered in designing and developing commercial Windows software.

In preparation for this seminar, we issued a GUI development questionnaire to our UK contacts. As you would imagine, the common factor that underlies our database is an interest in APL linked with a higher than usual number of non-PC owners (Mac, Atari, Amiga etc). Analysis of the results threw up some interesting statistics which we will be discussing in more detail at the seminar, but as a preview, it is worth noting a few of the findings. Bear in mind that multiple answers are quite possible, so numbers don’t add up to 100%

We asked people about their choice of GUI environment and came up with figures that seem to match the standard industry figures:

The most favoured database was Oracle with 21% followed by Informix (8%) and Sybase (6%). The most popular database server was Novell (32%), followed by Unix (28%) then OS/2 (15%).

We asked about GUI development tools in two categories — ‘low level’ (such as C) or ‘high level’ (such as SQL Windows). For low level tools, C++ led with 26%, followed by C with 19% (APL clocked up 6%). The most favoured ‘high level tool was Visual Basic (19%). There was an even spread of names for other high level tools and APL re-appeared here as a possible high-level tool. Only one version of APL was mentioned.

Dyadic Systems Ltd¶

All registered Dyalog APL/W users should by now have received their (free) upgrades to Version 6.3. The reception to 6.3 during the Beta Test was extremely positive and judging from the efforts of some users commercial APL-based products — that are indistinguishable in terms of look and feel from other Windows applications — should soon begin to appear.

The new ⎕NA facility to call Windows DLL routines is proving to be exceptionally popular, not least because it is entirely dynamic and very fast. With ⎕NA, users have themselves been able to generate powerful and efficient interfaces to various other products including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Insight Systems in Denmark is even using ⎕NA to provide a facility that will connect Dyalog APL/W users to practically any commercial database running on almost any host system — directly from a Windows workstation. Contact Morten Kromberg on +45-4210-7022 for details.

The device-independent graphics in Version 6.3 has also been well-received, as has the fact that you can at last produce APL listings on practically any printer with no effort at all. For this, Dyadic is grateful to Adrian Smith for allowing the distribution of his excellent TrueType APL font with Dyalog APL. The new version of WSDOC, which is included with 6.3, has a Windows front-end, and makes the production of attractive looking APL listings a very simple matter indeed.

To illustrate the powerful new bitmap-handling capabilities, Dyalog APL/W includes a version of the “Arachnid” card game (a form of Patience) which is coded entirely in APL. This game requires a certain amount of skill, and none of the beta-testers discovered the APL coding error that crashed the workspace when the game was successfully completed! On a reasonably fast PC, the APL workspace is practically identical in look and feel to a standard Windows card game, and it amply demonstrates that Dyalog APL/W can compete effectively with other GUI development tools. The new version of the WDESIGN workspace takes full advantage of the graphical facilities built in to the interpreter. New objects are created by clicking on a “Visual Basic look-alike” toolbar (in place of the buttons used in version 1), and the workspace now includes interactive facilities to design icons, cursors, bitmaps, and your own custom “toolbars”. WDESIGN supports all the new object types provided in Version 6.3, so you can also use graphics to add 3-D effects to your dialog boxes.

On the Unix front, Dyadic has produced new releases of Dyalog APL for the IBM RS/6000 (AIX 3.2) and for Sun Workstations (Solaris 2.1). The RS/6000 version is up to 10% faster than previous releases. Work on a Motif implementation, based on Dyalog APL/W, has begun in earnest.

Dyadic is pleased to announce the recruitment of Graeme Robertson, ex IPSA, who joins the team as an APL consultant. The company is also delighted to report its most successful year of trading since it was established in 1979.