Looking for the "one".

I have spent countless dollars and hours looking for the "one". I am not talking about the finding a significant other. What I am talking about is a tool for the Universe/Unidata world. Not a day had gone by when some programmer would announce the great tool since sliced bread. I cannot name half of them nor would I care to.

Today, except in some green screen software companies and those not enlightened, every one is looking for a way to GUI the interface for the multivalue applications. To say I found the solution for everyone is a brash statement that would need considerable facts that would be worth the effort. There are, however, some points that I have learned in this arduous process of taking code that is some cases over 25 year and moving them into our Web-enabled world.

I have a significant amount of business logic that I just do not want to lose or reinvent, so what did I do with all the Basic code. First, every program that had a user interface (UI) was removed. That's right I delete all of the UI from the Basic code. All that was left was just the basic code necessary to update the files and verify the integrity of that data or the business logic.

I found JavaScript a scripting language that is very close to Basic in many ways and unfortunately very close to Java as well. The validation of dates, numbers, codes, and even calling Basic Subroutines to verify inventory levels, was re-written in JavaScript. I, then, had a series of functions that could be called from any form and perform the data checking I needed to accomplish what I had been doing in Basic for many years.

I had not even found the "one", but I found a way to accomplish one of the goals without purchasing a product.

There is a great tutorial at W3Schools if you need help with JavaScript.

The Beginning

For over 27 years I have been involved in the "pick" world that morphed from R83 to Prime Information and subsequently morphed into IBM's Unidata/Universe databases. Along the way my company U2logic created tools for myself and my staff to use. We even sold some of them along the way to our customers and fellow programmers.

I created a programming environment called APT which was short for A Programmer's Tool. In retrospect it was not much of a tool. The competitors at that time where Toads, SB, and TPS to name a few I remember.

Funny now, I even remember creating a BASIC full screen editor that was based on my experience with the one I used in Revelation version G. That full screen editor was called S.EDT. Of course, I never sold it. That name is really awful must have been thought up by a programmer. Oh yeah, it was.

I will be on my soap box from time to time and even evangelistic about the databases I use everyday. You have to be our world is not driven by any company marketing effort on IBM's part but on the backs of the VAR's (Value added resellers) that dominate this marketplace.