daveh@marob.MASA.COM (Dave Hammond) (07/12/88)
To XENIX system owners, operators, managers, and consultants:
DSI has recently completed work on a Human Interface and Command Executor
system, currently for internal system use. The package is a Curses-based
set of human interface management tools, including a tree-structured Menu
system, a screen Form editor, a Point-and-select list manager,
context-sensitive Help, full keyboard recognition, keystroke "learn" macros
and much more.
In its current form the system allows system administrators, developers
and project managers to easily prototype, develop and maintain host-login and
application interfaces containing the above mentioned features without any
required programming. The system provides a set of straight-forward interface
management commands for building interactive interfaces for normally command
line oriented commands. For example, one could design an interactive interface
for "grep" which would use a dialog box to get a search string and then present
a Point-and-select list of files in the current directory for grepping.
The two statements required to define the interface would be:
GetLine 'Enter the text string to search for.'
Point -lf. grep "$GETLINE" %p
In addition to the interface management commands, a large stable of built-in
commands is provided to manage file access (Edit,Copy,Move,etc) and system
services (Mail,UUCP,etc). A complete set of Menu and Form scripts provide
access to the most often used Unix commands "right out of the box". Adding
project-specific built-in commands should be simple for knowlegeable C
programmers.
The system is designed without dependence upon a particular command
interpreter or style of command syntax, making it suitable as an interface to
non host-system interface packages (for example database management systems).
All aspects of system presentation and capacity are user configurable; There
are no hard-wired memory limitations; All messages are file-based.
We would like to get the opinions of XENIX system professionals as to the
usefulness of such a system in general, and the effectiveness of this
system in particular. Our interest is in deciding whether or not to make the
package available commercially. DSI will privide interested parties with
a a complete set of object files, source related to system configuration
and command extensions, example Menu and screen Form script files and
documentation. All we ask in return is an honest evaluation of the product
and its potential market acceptance.
If you have the time (and desire) to lend assistance with an evaluation of
this package and have access to a 286/386 based SCO XENIX machine (with the
Developement system), please contact:
Dave Hammond
DSI Communications, Inc.
333 W. Merrick Road
Valley Stream, NY 11580
(516) 872-3535
UUCP: {uunet|sun|...}!hombre!marob!daveh
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