Catching Up

Has it really been this long since I posted?

Must do better: but the past few weeks have been insanely busy juggling a lot of small projects (including converting ENTER to handle SIMPLE definitions, and for a real PRIME client - would you believe it?)  and one dragging on - adapting mvPDF to directly output PCL for faster printing.

The regular Windows PCL drivers are notoriously slow (just Google for PCL and slow) and bloat-producing, so this has meant changing the report generation in particular to directly generate PCL macros and to use better compression for the content. You did know mvPDF did reporting, and not just raw PDFs, didn't you?

It has been a nightmare. I will never code PCL again.

But amongst these tribulations one particular client project has been especially interesting in its own painful way, and containing a number of features deserving of comment.

SWINE (Secure Windows Emulator)

There seems to come a time in every serious MultiValue developers' life when he or she has to write a terminal emulator: it just goes with the territory. Back in the mists of time one of my colleagues created WinTerm so I had some idea how difficult this seemingly simple technology can be.

The new terminal emulator in question is a highly customized emulator written for a specific client.

Amongst its features are:

• Encrypted communication with UniVerse using Telnet over SSL. On Solaris.
• Programmable look and feel.
• Scripting language to control such aspects as exporting, capture and opening URLs.
• Security and other constraints that I'm not going to share.

Aside from that, it's written in C# which gives its own peculiar restrictions, especially when it comes to performance and graphics. And it would be nice if it could automatically correct my typing but that's a bit beyond..

It does give me an opportunity to blog about:

• SSL and UniVerse, and how to set this up on UNIX-like systems.
• Scripting using the Irony compiler toolkit.
• Getting almost sensible performance out of .Net (hint, avoid GDI+).

So watch this space over the coming days.

U2 UniVersity

The U2 UniVersity visits the UK this month, so if you are involved in U2 and you have not signed up - shame on you! This is the main event and I look forward to meeting y'all there.

U2 User Group

After a long wait we are finally ready for the new board elections, and I can step down once again as President. The presidential roles are managed on a three year rolling cycle - the Vice President is elected, becomes President after the first year and Past President the year after. It gives a good blend of continuity and change.

The election is also a good time to announce the launch of one of our pet projects - an incubator for new (and old) U2 developers. This is an open source collection of applications all featuring the same underlying database and giving examples of how to use the U2 technologies around it - similar to the sample applications provided by Microsoft for SQL Server.

I've started the ball rolling with a simple C# and UniObjects.NET implementation, and my colleagues will be adding various other pieces - reporting using DataVu, terminal based versions, and so forth. Over time we want the community to embrace and extend this so it becomes a useful resource for everyone.