Amalgamated Software of North America Inc says a preview version of Visual RPG should be available by the end of the month. The product, which had been expected in September last year, supports RPG/400 code but brings RPG programing into the world of Windows. ASNA says the delay has been caused by the level of feedback from the 100 or so beta sites, and the subsequent tweaks to the product. ASNA expects release 1.0 to be substantially the same product as the preview, and a May launch is planned. There were will be a standard edition that will have Visual RPG, plus Amalganated’s DataGate for personal computers; and a professional edition that will also have a Netsoft router and the portion of DataGate that runs on the AS/400. The standard edition will cost ú360 and the professional ú500. Visual RPG has been in development for two years and represents a significant investment for the small Bear Lake, California-based company. Amalgamated hopes to capitalise on the large installed base of AS/400 users looking to bring Windows interfaces to their existing programs. During development, it says it took the decision to focus its efforts on its cut-down database management system, DataGate. Amalgamated describes DataGate as middleware and says it enables applications built in Visual RPG to run on a personal computer or in other environments. It wants to expand DataGate’s capabilities and needs to develop programming interfaces, or support for Open Database Connectivity, to do this. It is working with various partners that have, or will, incorporate DataGate into their products, such as Belfast, Northern Ireland-based Unibol Ltd whose Unibol/400 development environment, for migrating from OS/400 to Unix, uses DataGate.
