Software development has come a long way since the days of the READY> prompt. The dawn of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) spawned sweeping changes. Greater sophistication and convenience for the user means tremendously increased complexity for the developer, whose old methods and character-based tools are quickly becoming inadequate. Years ago, BASIS offered a full screen editor utility, _edit, with features like built-in syntax checking, search and replace, and hotkeys for merging subroutines. Command line-driven lister and compiler utilities followed, which allowed Business BASIC developers to choose their own third party text editors. BASIS' first truly graphical product, Visual PRO/5®, offered ResBuilder®, GUIBuilder®, and DDBuilder® to help develop applications for Microsoft Windows.
With the advent of BBj®, BASIS faced a crossroads with the realization that stable, separate, and stand-alone utilities were inadequate. Accessing the power of BBj and using it to write graphical, multiplatform, Web-enabled applications demanded something much better. BASIS needed a new tool, designed from the ground up, to work with GUIs and still handle the character-based code of the past. Furthermore, BASIS needed a development system to bring together the many processes required to build a modern software application. BASIS needed a complete IDE.
The fastest and best way to create such a development environment was to take advantage of existing and proven solutions. The answer was to use NetBeans®, an open-source Java-based IDE project sponsored by Sun Microsystems, the developers of Java itself. BBj 2.0 introduced BASIS first NetBeans-based IDE for writing Business BASIC software using BBj. Although this first IDE had limitations, it was a quantum leap beyond anything previously offered. For the first time, a dedicated source code editor contained features such as syntax highlighting, abbreviation expansion, and keyboard macro recording. In subsequent releases, BASIS greatly enhanced and developed this tool further to become the BASIS Integrated Development Environment or IDE.
BASIS takes a new productivity leap forward in GUI development with the Barista® rapid application development tool. Barista is BASIS' GUI-only data dictionary-driven development framework and runtime engine. Barista facilitates:
- New GUI application development
- Conversion of CUI applications to GUI
- Modernization of existing GUI applications
Barista is database independent and works with both modern SQL RDBMS as well as legacy BASIS file types. Barista imports a third party RDBMS or a BASIS data dictionary and, with little development effort, delivers a functional GUI application running on multiple platforms with a modern GUI look-and-feel, standardized keyboard and mouse navigation, and a built-in SQL-based inquiry engine. Barista delivers enormous productivity gains on both initial product development and, more importantly, on future application maintenance and enhancement tasks.
