DrDialog: A "Visual Rexx" Rapid Application Development tool
Источник: https://www.dmorrill.com
Публикую на сайте ссылку на очень интересную книгу Дэвида К. Моррилла (David C. Morrill) «DrDialog: "Визуальный Rexx" Инструмент быстрой разработки приложений». Не лишним будет сказать, что Дэвид К. Моррилл (David C. Morrill) является разработчикам DrDialog’а, поэтому эта книга весьма интересна. Она снабжена большим количеством иллюстраций, и является лучшим учебным пособием по среде DrDialog. Так как книга имеет сложную структуру, размещаю ссылку на оригинальную копию.
Готовя материал, я столкнулся с проблемой, что современные браузеры пытаются ограничить доступ к сайту, считаю его вредоносным. Не бойтесь если получите подобное предупреждение.
In early 1993, I began work in a group at IBM Research that had aspirations of spinning off a new business venture. I was brought in to develop the user interface for the project.
At the time IBM was still strongly behind OS/2, and it seemed a natural choice as the platform for our development. However, I quickly realized that the tools available on OS/2 for creating user interfaces were woefully inadequate. Therefore, in addition to the task of defining the user interface for our project, I also began to concurrently develop a new dialog editor for OS/2.
Within a fairly short span of time I had the new editor up and running and had begun to use it in our project development. Then one day, in a flash of insight, it occurred to me that it might possible to take advantage of a feature of the REXX programming API to create a rapid application development tool based on my new dialog editor and REXX.
I began to work feverishly on this new idea, and at the end of a couple more weeks I had completed the first version of what I eventually called DrDialog. Realizing that this new tool would be of use to more people than just myself, I placed a version of the program in the IBM internal tools repository and posted a note about it in several internal IBM REXX and OS/2 developer forums.
The results were immediate and electrifying. Developers all around IBM began to download the tool, liked what they saw, and began to comment about it in the on-line forums.
As the volume of forum traffic rapidly increased, DrDialog quickly developed its own internal user forum. The positive feedback and the numerous requests for new features soon had me working many late nights.
For a while, new versions of DrDialog were created roughly every other week, with bug fix versions released even more frequently. Looking back now, I realize that this was probably one of the happiest times of my career in IBM. I was writing tons of code, documentation and correspondence; I was directly helping a lot of people do things they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise; and I was running the whole "show" myself.
Of course, I should have known it couldn't last. Eventually I had to stop working on DrDialog and sadly move on to other things.
Perhaps its interesting to note that it was only after I was forced to stop working on DrDialog that other parts of IBM "officially" began to realize its value, resulting in its later release outside of IBM both through the IBM OS/2 developer support program and as part of the OS/2 Warp product sold in Japan.
For some reason I've never completely understood, DrDialog was always very popular in Japan. Even now, years later, when I finally thought to do a Google search for DrDialog on the web, I was surprised by the large number of Japanese web pages I ran across (none of which I could read, by the way) that mention DrDialog.
It was also a pleasant surprise to find out accidentally, and after the fact, that DrDialog was heavily used in the broacaster support system developed by IBM for both the Atlanta and Nagano Olympics. I guess I'll never know how many other projects, large and small, benefited from DrDialog.