by Mike Devoe
In a prior posting, I reminisced about my early days as a script programmer when I thought scripting would eventually become obsolete. My thinking was scripting would remain viable as long as we were working with terminal emulation where we could easily watch text being written to the screen.
Over the years, terminal emulation didn’t go away. Instead, it became more complex as MEDITECH tried to jam in new “Windowish” features such as grids, buttons, combo boxes and drop-down menus. As MEDITECH tried to make terminal emulation look more like Windows, we ended up with a lot of screens that both looked and behaved differently. I’m sure having so many different styles of screens was irritating to the users. To a programmer developing a scripting tool, it was downright maddening.
I doubt MEDITECH ever expected anyone to look at their software as I do. As described in my previous post, I watch their workstation software ask the operating system to do stuff such as draw text on the screen. As MEDITECH began hanging “Windowish” features on their terminal emulation, it started looking like a real mess when you looked at it from the operating system’s point of view. I’ve watched their applications use up to eight different ways to write text, two of which involved writing entire screens one character at a time. I’ve seen a half a dozen different ways to draw a button. On some screens, buttons are real Windows buttons while on other screens they’ve drawn a picture of a button and just sense if the user clicked on the screen region where the button had been drawn. These inconsistencies touched everything, which made tracking their screens a real nightmare for scripting tool developers.
When FOCUS (and Client/Server 5.6) came along, the new more consistent look and feel of the application was not only pleasing to users but it greatly simplified scripting. FOCUS now behaves consistently under the hood, similar to neat and orderly terminal emulation. From the operating system’s point of view, everything is clean, efficient and well-mannered. When they write text, they write it one way. When they draw a button, they use a single methodology. Despite the fact that FOCUS and C/S are not terminal emulators; I’m pleased they look so much like it from my point of view.
1 response so far ↓
1 John Sharpe // Feb 23, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Consistent behavior from MEDITECH in a script.Life is good!
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