************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * December 2002 * * * ************************************* News and Comments Thank you to all of the customers of DB/C Software Company for another fine year. In the face of another poor year for sales of computer-related products and services, DB/C Software Company continues to prosper. I'd especially like to thank the employees of DB/C Software - Jamie Findlay, Sean Neeley and Vicki Liszewksi - for their commitment to providing excellent software and support. We've accomplished quite a lot this year. DB/C DX and DB/C FS continue to mature. This month's newsletter provides a quick overview of these accomplishments. Happy New Year! don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** The Year in Review 2002 started out with a bang. In January we released DB/C DX 12.0. This release contained many new features. Most of the new features were in three areas: new GUI capabilities, printing enhancements, and improvements to Smart Client. It's interesting to look back and see how certain features of the DB/C language have become so heavily used that they are now just taken for granted. One of these features is support for graphical printing. Use of pixel positioning, fonts, colors, graphic elements and images are now a standard feature of printed forms and reports in many DB/C applications. Initially these print capabilities were limited to Windows printers in the GUI version of DB/C, but the features and supported environments have expanded through the years. Now with support for directly creating PDF files, portable high quality graphical printed output is easily accomplished regardless of your operating system or whether your application user interface is character or graphical mode. DB/C JX was an interesting experience. We had high hopes for it when it was released in 1997. We put a few thousand man-hours into its creation. We did get it to work for all DB/C programs (except those using COMFILEs), but it was never as fast or quite as good as DB/C DX. It was our first commercial failure, so this year we ceased development and support, renamed it 'JX' and made it be open source. Not much has happened with it since - there appears to be little or no activity either on the JX email lists or otherwise. We chalk it up as an expensive learning experience. DB/C FS has been just the opposite of DB/C JX. It has been a rousing success, both technically and financially. We released DB/C FS 3.1 in July. It contained a few highly requested features including encryption, improved accessibility through firewalls, and constant monitoring of connections so that broken connections can be more quickly recycled. DB/C DX 12.1 was released in September. Its primary new feature is the CLIENTROLLOUT verb for use with Smart Client. (It's the first new verb in the DB/C language in several years!) DB/C DX 12.1 also contained several GUI enhancements and other new features. The dbctalk email list has grown dramatically this year. We now have more than 110 active subscribers to the list. More than a quarter of the active subscribers have posted five or more emails to dbctalk this year. It is a diverse and knowledgeable group. If you aren't a subscriber, you are really missing out on a great source of information about DX and FS. The volume of emails is not large (on average a few per day) and the list subscription process is tightly controlled so your email address won't get added to any spam lists - so why not subscribe today? To get started, send an email to 'dbctalk-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. We began two major development projects this year that are based on Eclipse, the IBM sponsored open source IDE platform that continues to get favorable reviews and to add big company sponsors to its steering group (Oracle is the newest steering group member). See the February 2002 DB/C Newsletter for information about Eclipse. In 2003, we will be announcing products based on these projects. In summary, 2002 has been a good year at DB/C Software Company. We accomplished quite a bit. More importantly, we are poised for a great 2003! ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: January 13-15, 2003 Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent.