Unibol Ltd, the Mallusk, Northern Ireland-based company that made its name with tools for running System 36 and AS/400 applications on Unix boxes, has fixed its sights on becoming a more general open systems supplier. The first contribution to the new strategy is Unibol Desktop which goes into the first beta site next week. It is a simple tool designed to link host-based applications to their own icons on the Windows desktop. The guts of the product sits as a NetWare Loadable Module on a NetWare server – clicking on a particular icon makes the Loadable Module start the appropriate session on the host and pipe it back to the Windows window. The code is designed to work with existing terminal emulation software so all it essentially does is cut out the tedious process of selecting the host and logging on, but at least naive users don’t have to worry whether the application is on their personal computer or on a mainframe somewhere. The second product, ready for demonstration at the end of the month, is more interesting in that Unibol is providing a way to turn dull old menu-driven RPG and Cobol programs into fashionably iconic applications. The simplest way of doing this would be to use a ‘screen-scraper’ clever terminal emulation that interprets the incoming stream of screen data and puts up buttons and so forth as appropriate, but Unibol director of sales and marketing Ian Graham dismisses this as inherently unreliable. His approach is to extend the host’s programming language, providing a number of remote procedure calls that can drive the client windowing software and instruct it to display icons or dialogues as required. The aim is to cut through the tangled mass of menu items that beset AS/400 users, by pulling out important menu items and turning them into icons – the claimed benefits are speedier navigation around applications and reduced training times. Graham has a penchant for Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic as currently the best environment for building Windows applications, consequently the client end of the software will be delivered as a set of dynamic link libraries for the language. It is claimed that the average application can be given an iconic face-lift in a few days.
