waserman@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Tony Wasserman%MIS) (04/20/85)
Release 1.3 of the User Software Engineering distribution from
the Section on Medical Information Science at UC San Francisco is now
available. The distribution includes:
1) Troll/USE relational DBMS -- a compact, fully-relational DBMS
with an algebraic interface. Troll/USE supports the following
domain types: integer, float, boolean, fixed and variable
length strings, date, time and enumerated types (scalars).
Relation level operations are select, project, join, and product;
tuple level operations include foreach and cursor management.
Internal storage structure is prefix B-trees. Troll/USE is
quite efficient and compares favorably in performance with
some of the expensive DBMS's.
The new version of Troll/USE also contains a pg command that
allows page-by-page tabular display of items from a database.
Initialization scripts are also supported to provide a
``poor-man's" view mechanism.
2) RAPID/USE application development system -- RAPID/USE is used
both as a means for designing and prototyping user interfaces
to alphanumeric displays AND as a way to link the user interface
to programmed actions. RAPID/USE uses a state-transition based
model of user-program interaction as a basis for system
construction. The actions may be programmed with the data
manipulation language of Troll/USE or in C, Fortran 77, or
Pascal. (You can even combine them all in a single system!)
Release 1.3 supports dates and time, as well as providing a
sophisticated display option for alignment and formatting of
constants and variables.
RAPID/USE has two parts: a Transition Diagram Interpreter (TDI)
and an Action Linker. TDI alone allows the design and
implementation of interfaces, and linkage to Troll/USE.
The Action Linker allows the linkage of source code or
libraries with the dialogue description and database
management actions.
3) TBE -- Troll/USE relation browser and editor
TBE is a low keystroke tool for editing and retrieving
data from a single relation. A major enhancement in TBE
over the previous version is the ability to display relational
data in tabular format. One can also define one's own
commands.
4) Troll/USE library -- a set of routines callable from C and a
similar set of routines callable from Fortran 77 for linking
arbitrary C and FORTRAN 77 programs to the Troll/USE RDBMS.
5) Test jobs and examples for Troll/USE and RAPID/USE
6) Various Troll/USE utilities, including a meta-database
facility (mtroll), a user monitor with history (trump),
and a filtering program (extract) that allows information
from a Troll/USE database to be sent to stdout, and
thereby piped to other programs, for such things as
plotting and statistical analysis.
7) A configuration system, used to create the makefiles to
compile the software on various machines. This software
can be used by others to define implementation-dependent
constants (wordsize, alignment, etc.) as a porting aid.
The heuristic program confmake tries to determine the
Unix flavor of its host.
8) Our set of fixes to curses. With the configuration system,
you may use either curses/termcap or terminfo with our
software.
9) Experimental software, not officially part of the USE
distribution, but useful nonetheless. This includes a
version control/configuration management system (IDE) that
stores project information in Troll/USE relations; a
graphic transition diagram editor (tde) developed to run on the
Sun Workstation (as shown at Usenix) , TIDE, an interactive
relation editor written with RAPID/USE for designing and
modifying Troll/USE relations, etc.
The distribution includes sources, objects (for several versions of
Unix) and documentation. Documentation includes
reference manuals, tutorials, manual pages, etc., both phototypeset
hardcopy and online versions. Distribution medium is 9-track tar
format tape, 1600 bpi. Distribution fee is $600 for everything for a
single machine; $100 for each additional machine.
The software cannot be relicensed under the standard agreement.
As usual, you must sign a license agreement with the University of
California, but your attorneys will find this one less tedious than
the one from Berkeley. In particular, no proof of source license
is required, since this is all application software.
The software is officially unsupported and comes without warranty or
maintenance agreement. We cannot answer lengthy queries or
questionnaires, nor provide extensive free consulting. However,
commercial support is available for those
who need and want it. (Note that the University version is freely
available -- we have about 100 sites now, mostly industrial.)
To obtain a distribution packet with license agreement, etc., send
E-mail to {ucbvax,ucivax,ucsfcgl}!ucsfmis!waserman or walters.
By USPS,
Prof. Anthony I. Wasserman (or Ms. Tina Walters)
User Software Engineering Distribution
Medical Information Science
Room A-16
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143 USA
You may also call for a distribution packet: (415) 666-2951.
We can also provide contact information for commercial support.
It's LOTS of source code and documentation, plus object files, so
there is no reasonable way that it can be electronically transmitted,
even if there were no license agreement. However, each of the pieces
is quite compact and will not cripple your machine.