Stig Nielsen of SimCorp
In the third week of Dyalog ’19 recordings, Stig Nielsen from SimCorp A/S talks about recent work to turn a very large body of APL code, originally designed to work well on workstations, into a 3-tier solution. This requires turning everything “inside out”, making the application a service that can be called from cloud-based components. Fortunately, the parts of the application that have been implemented in APL have been using a model-driven approach to user interface specification for decades. This makes the task a lot simpler compared to some of the code written in other languages (which needs a complete rewrite). Stig explains both the obvious solution and the one that might actually work.
Brian Becker shows us the HTMLRenderer
The other two talks that we are releasing this week are also related to producing portable user interfaces. The HTMLRenderer is a component that is integrated with Dyalog APL under Microsoft Windows, GNU Linux and Apple macOS. It allows APL applications to use HTML/JavaScript to produce Desktop applications that behave identically on all these platforms – in much the same way that NodeJS allows. Brian Becker introduces new features of the HTMLRenderer in version 17.1, and a number of tools that allow you to build user interfaces that run not only on the HTMLRenderer, but also as a Web Server.
Josh David demonstrates his Easy GUI
Josh David follows up with a talk about “EasyGUI”, a tool that he built as his final year project at Scranton University. EasyGUI is built upon the HTMLRenderer, and allows applications to have a very simple UI for collecting input from the user and for displaying progress bars, simple reports or graphics. It does this without requiring that the user learn any HTML, JavaScript or CSS – it is all generated by a set of very simple functions.
Summary of this week’s videos:
See you next week for the next three recordings from Dyalog ’19.
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