As many of you probably know, we have not been supporting the old style C
code programs, the 2 pmconsoles and attendant utilities (affectionately
known as the pmtoys), for a bit over a year now. The purpose of this lack
of support is that we've been working on a new set of tools, that we feel
(and feedback to date confirms) are far superior to the old programs. Java
provides us with an environment to develop not only GUI applications, but
more traditional command line (think pminstall and pmcommand) utilities as
well. The new tools are written entirely in Java, which gives us a couple
of advantages. First, Java is a much better programming language than C or
C++. Java programs are much more reliable than C or C++ programs. This is
because there is no programmer initiated memory allocation, and there are
no programmer accessible pointers. Second, Java provides a much greater
degree of program portability than other platforms. All facets of the
operating environment have been abstracted through the virtual machine, or
VM. This puts portability in the hands of the OS vendor, as it should be,
while allowing the application programmer to concentrate on the
application. Of course, all this wonderfulness does not come without a
penalty. In our case, there are two major ones. First, and universally,
Java programs are inherently slower than compiled code. In order to be
truly portable, Java compiles not to object code, but to byte codes. These
byte codes are translated to object code at runtime. Second, in our case,
we were working with a very early version of Java. We have more bolt-ons
to fix broken Java stuff than I care to think about. The good news is that
Java is getting much better, but the bolt-ons did delay development
significantly.
The suite of tools we have/are developing is as follows. Needless to say,
I won't give actual release dates for unreleased product, but I wouldn't
say anything if I didn't think the release was imminent.
OR Wizard - GUI Installation Wizard for ISDN Office Routers - V2.0 released
PMVision - GUI EMS for PortMasters - currently in open beta
PPPDecoder - GUI realtime decoder ring for PPP negotiation - V1.0 released
as unsupported pilot
PMUtilities - Command line utilities for install, backup, command, ... -
closed beta
Hope this helps - thanks for your attention and support
andy
++++
NOC Advocate andy@livingston.com
Lucent Technologies, Remote Access Business Unit (510)737-2151
4464 Willow Road http://www.livingston.com
Pleasanton, CA 94588 http://www.lucent.com
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