News on an Application development system!

[Ben Duncan]

Ok, as many now, I have been a long time fan and advocate of Appgen.
The demise of Appgen last October, the subsequent "legal" maneuverings
of the company that bought JUST the AppGen "I.P.", with the latest
being that they can "Provide" to the existing re-sellers who have
customized VERTICALS, and "open and unlimited" AppGen re-sell license
provided we give them the package, distribution and re-sell rights
to our verticals !!!

Oh brother .....

Now, I have been experimenting with Python and it is indeed a very good
language, but lacked some of the things that would be able to build a
good "Applications Development" environment without a whole lot of work.
This is things such as the ability to create screens that can allow
heads down data entry as well as being applied to a GUI environment
without having to have 2 separate code bases.

Well low and behold, I started playing with the S-Lang library someone
did for Python, then S-Lang itself. For the time being, any development
and experimentation to do this project using PYTHON is on hold in favor
of doing it in S-Lang !!! S-Lang now has a "shell" environment, a much
simpler and elegant way of building add on library modules. I am told
S-Lang version 2.0, when it is released, is going to have even more new
and exciting features.

An example of S-Lang's feature set is the "newt" library (based to be run
in python) that Redhat uses as it's installer that uses the S-Lang screen
library. JED and slrn are 2 other applications that are based in S-Lang, as
well as the current DOS emulator system.

SO, given all that, For the past 10 days I have been heads down in the
S-Lang doc's, creating test programs, playing with S-Lang's intrinsic
functions and having a ball!.

There is now no doubt in my mind, that S-Lang could be the system
to give the Appgen replacement I want. It (S-lang) could be
extended to create the "Rapid" application development toolkit
and runtime to run the Applications themselves.

The question is now, does anyone in the group wish to join me in
this endeavor?


-- 
Ben Duncan   - VersAccounting Software LLC 336 Elton Road  Jackson MS, 39212
"Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
        - Hanlon's Razor