Under the control of Cristal, the development of the Genius
Application Suite was neglected and customer relations were stretched to
breaking point. But despite the best efforts of the previous management many
customers recognised that Genius is a robust and reliable environment for
managing and processing business critical data.
With the original development team back in control and determined
to recover the lost ground, our customers have responded magnificently. New
licence sales have been made for the first time in ten years and revenue from
this source has exceeded £130,000.
Rapidgen has brought forward the timetable for expanding our
technical resources and three previous members of staff are rejoining the team
from October. This will ensure that our plans for development can be
accelerated without risk to our customer support capabilities.
Roundup: Looking Good
RapidGen is happy to report that the first
nine months of operations have exceeded our initial expectations. And our
customers deserve much of the credit.
Development News
Work continues on porting Genius to Intel IA-64 (Itanium), and
already we have a simple program running on an HP Integrity server under
OpenVMS 8.2. There is much of the compiler codegenerator still to write,
but we intend to have a version ready for release Q1 2007.
In parallel with this, we are implementing an Alpha instruction
emulator which will simplify and speed up porting to any future new hardware
types by providing an
Continued on page 2 >
Development News (cont)
interim solution until a native codegenerator is available.
The Alpha instruction set was chosen because it is relatively simple to
emulate, and the existing Alpha codegenerator is very well tried and tested.
On the easyGenius front, we plan to improve the presentation
capabilities in several ways. HTML output will be enhanced by using
cascading stylesheets and adding language keywords to apply user-specified
styles to individual fields. XML output will also be enhanced, allowing
easy transformation of output to formats required by other packages and
systems. One of the most interesting
Customer Applications
We are looking at the potential for working with customers to
spin-off generic versions of applications developed with the Genius Solution.
Expect a call!
Genius Support
With the expansion of RapidGen Software Ltd, a number of
experienced staff who left during the Cristal era are returning to the team.
In the future, calls to our technical support number 020 8979
3070, may not always be answered by Richard. You can however be assured of
competent technical advice.
You are reminded that the preferred method of support contact is
email via support@rapidgen.co.uk.
This route not only provides a record of the enquiry but is
accessible to all of our staff, wherever they are located.
uses of this will be to generate WordML (the XML representation
of Microsoft Word documents), so that for the first time easyGenius will be
able to produce a high-quality Word document. Another possibility being
examined is direct generation of Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) files.
We are also looking to improve linkerGenius by directly
supporting execution of arbitrary SQL statements at all levels of the software.
This will allow many database operations to be performed much more
efficiently than with the present file-oriented mechanism, designed long before
SQL databases became pervasive.
DID YOU KNOW .
An icon on the Windows Desktop can run an
RPL program.
When you double-click on an icon on the
desktop, properties of this icon include the name, the icon image, the name of
the program to run (along with command line arguments) and the default
directory in which to run.
You can copy one of the existing installation entries on the
desktop and change its properties, or copy an entry from the program menu, (eg
that for Genius Solution). Typically the properties are similar to:
<icon>
Desktop name
Target type: Application
Target:"C:\Program Files\RapidGen\Genius
Solution\WNT\X86\rpw.exe" $prog
Start in: C:\demos\system
Desktop name:
Whatever name you have given to the icon on the desktop eg "DEMO SYSTEM"
Target: The path to the RPW.EXE executable installed on your
system. The argument $prog runs PROG.X86 from the default
directory (Set in Start in) or RSR$SYSTEM. This is usually a menu program. Note
the path must be quoted if one of the directories contains spaces.
Start in: The path for default file access.
The place where an initialisation file RSRV24.INI (if present) is
used to define environment variables locally.
[Environment]
CSL_TECH=C:\TEC\DATA
CSL_TECROOT=C:\TEC
RSR_REPORTS=C:\TEMP\_XFER
Because Unix systems treat $ symbols as substitution requests,
the Unix and Windows systems treat environment names with "_" and "$" as
equivalent.
If you omit the $prog argument from the Target, $RCM will be
started in a window.
At the RCM> prompt you can issue the command SHOW
ENV * to check environment variables have been defined as expected.
NB that RSRV24.INI is only read when the
runtime system is started
NB that RSRDDS must be copied to windows by
using SAVE and LOAD GDE or DDE
commandline commands as a serial file, you
cannot copy the RMS indexed file to the PC.
New Technical Team
RapidGen Software is committed to building customer confidence in
the future of Genius and to this end we are expanding our technical team.
Three past employees with many years experience of Genius
application development and technical consulting are rejoining the team to
boost our technical support and consulting resources.
We will be profiling each individual in future newsletters
and in the coming
months we hope that they will be developing a relationship with
our customers and discussing ways to enhance the performance of Genius
installations.
Subsequent projects included maintenance and enhancements of
BCPL, Coral66 and Fortran77 compiler systems for PDP-11, Interdata 8/32,
Computer Automation LSI-2 and LSI-4, and porting to DEC VAX systems.
In 1982 he joined the team that developed the Genius Solution,
initially producing the first versions of RPL to run on VAX/VMS. He was
responsible for the development of many of the user tools and program
generators that formed the Genius Solution; from RCL and SimplyGenius to the
System Builder (RDU) and InfoGenius.
Richard is also responsible for the progress in interaction
styles of the product, from plain text screens with prompted character
responses, through forms with arrow key navigation, highlighting and individual
entry help messages, to GUI navigation and its emulation on simple VT100
terminals.
Richard brings to RapidGen Software Ltd, 24 years of experience
of development, customer training, licensing and support for The Genius
Solution.
While his first priority is customer support, he is actively
involved in code prototyping for the Itanium release, enhancing the Genius
installers and product development.
Richard Kirkman, Chief Technology Officer
Richard read Physics at Oxford and whilst working for the
Atmospheric Physics Department on data collection from satellite instruments,
went on to gain his MA and Msc.
His early experience with mult-user interactive computing,
included DEC PDP-11, PDP-10, and PDP-8 systems.
