Articles

New Powerful Scripting Engine

eXpress Enterprise Revs Up the Feature That Saves the Most Time

Related products: UTS eXpress Enterprise and T27 eXpress Enterprise

In an effort to provide added flexibility to application development, eXpress Enterprise comes with a completely new scripting engine allowing a choice of BasicScripts, PascalScripts or JScripts.  Consequently, maintaining scripts in a language compatible with commonly used application development packages (Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Delphi and Java) offers shops the ability to standardize and simplify their development efforts.

Like the eXpress Plus product line, eXpress Enterprise includes a visual Dialog Designer that, when coupled with the scripting languages, makes an even more powerful application development tool.  The Dialog Designer allows users to create object-oriented forms with controls (buttons, list boxes, etc.) that fire off Event Actions when users manipulate those controls at runtime.  As with scripts, the user chooses whether to maintain the Event Actions code in Basic, Pascal or Java.

A script might run based on a string of data received from a host application.  That script could then open a dialog that would solicit selected responses from the user.  Based on those responses, programmed Event Actions would take place to solicit additional information, interface with other PC/mainframe software, drive additional dialogs, or a myriad of other possibilities.  Regardless of how a site chooses to use scripts and dialogs, eXpress Enterprise requires no change to existing host applications.

Useful scripting examples are installed with eXpress Enterprise and others may be found in the online help.

The development environment for both scripting and dialog design includes helpful functions to check language syntax and to run scripts/forms with a debugging option.  The Dialog Designer offers an easy-to-use design pallet for visually creating forms.  Especially helpful is the new Class and Function Helper that allows the developer to see at-a-glance available classes, their properties and methods, functions/procedures/subs, variant types and constants.  There is even an option to copy the displayed entry to the clipboard for subsequent inclusion in a script or action.