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No Need To Whisper About These Products

Whisper Technology's development suite makes 3000 a more viable development platform

Review by John Burke

There has been renewed interest lately in the HP 3000 as a development platform: witness the Series 918/DX. However, to be successful as a development platform, the HP 3000 needs a GUI interface to the file system and a GUI development environment. In this Test Drive I am going to look at two related products from Whisper Technology -- Whisper FTP Plus and Whisper Programmer Studio. Both help make the HP 3000 a more viable development platform and both run on a Windows 95 or Windows NT desktop PC and connect via TCP/IP with either HP-UX or MPE/iX servers. One interface to both systems is a big plus if you have a heterogeneous.

I will concentrate in this report on how the products operate with MPE/iX, though they should perform similarly in an HP-UX environment. [Author's note: WTPS is currently in early Beta release as I test it. Usually we do not TestDrive beta software, but we made an exception in this case because of the potential of these products to be something special.]

Whisper FTP Plus
Whisper FTP Plus (WTFTPP) is consists of two modules, FTP Explorer and Edit Plus. WTFTPP is a PC FTP client with a Windows Explorer-like GUI frontend (FTP Explorer) and a Windows Notepad-like PC Editor (Edit Plus). Since WTFTPP is an FTP client, you must have FTPMON running on each HP 3000. [Note: any HP 3000 on MPE/iX 5.0 or later is guaranteed to have FTP since ARPA services, which include FTP, were bundled in FOS as of MPE/iX 5.0. Before that it had to be purchased. If you are not already using FTP, start by looking at the monitor job JFTPSTRT.ARPA.SYS and Chapter 7 of the "Communicator HP 3000 MPE/iX Release 5.0".]

You can define your view, or "connection" as Whisper calls it, to be either Posix or native MPE. Since it is a client, FTP Plus can only do what the server will allow, and in the case of FTP on MPE/iX, this means that anonymous FTP is not supported. However, with WTFTPP I do not see this as a problem: you want to use MPE security if you are going to allow the transfer, editing and creation of files.

As part of each connection definition, you assign a "user.account" to the connection name and store the password (or FTP Plus will prompt you each time if you prefer). You can "edit" only those files that MPE will allow you to edit. Also as part of each connection definition you can store the "root" for that connection. (See Figure 1 where I have defined a Posix view connection into the account where APACHE/iX lives and have opened a byte stream file with Edit Plus.) Within Explorer Plus you can manage (add/delete/rename) HFS directories, referred to as "folders" using Windows 95 terminology.

Since WTFTPP is an FTP client, you can select and STREAM a file. And, of course, you can transfer files between the HP 3000 and your PC. But, even though it looks like a file manager, it is not. You cannot drag and drop files on the HP 3000. However, like File Manager, if you double click on certain types of files (for example ..html). WTFTPP will launch the appropriate application (in this case IE). There is also a "send to" shortcut on the "right click" menu, again similar to "send to" in Windows 95.

Edit Plus looks like any other basic Windows editor, except in this case it also knows about MPE file attributes. If for example, you open a numbered MPE file, Edit Plus will recognize this and ask if you wish to use line numbers. It also recognizes Cobol formatted files. One wag called Edit Plus "Notepad on steroids" since, for example, you can edit multiple files simultaneously, create macros, mark lines with bookmarks and customize the insert menu with frequently used text strings. There are some problems with byte stream files in the current release, but they are fixed in the next release. In the meantime there are work-arounds.

Actually, Edit Plus is my new favorite way to edit byte stream files on the HP 3000. If I never have to use vi from the shell again, I will be a happy man. When you open a file in Edit Plus, it uses FTP to get the file from the HP 3000 and then uses FTP again to put it back on the HP 3000 when you "save" it. This is not as onerous as it might first appear. It took less than 20 seconds to "open" a 12,600 record program source file.

Whisper Programmer Studio
Whisper Technology Programmer Studio (WTPS) looks a lot like any other PC-based language development environment with different colors highlighting specific syntax and a project view orientation. But there is more. WTPS knows MPE/iX as well as HP-UX. Hell, it even knows SPL syntax! Think about that for a moment. Whisper Technology is positioning Programmer Studio as an integrated visual development environment for MPE and Unix, providing all the features of a modern Windows-based IDE, including the ability to manage projects and edit, compile and link programs on a remote server.

Figure 2 shows a simple project I created with two SPL source files, a portion of one is displayed in the upper right window. WTPS uses different colors to highlight different sections (comments one color, operators another). The result of the compile is displayed in the lower window. Figure 3 shows a portion of the structure of the program. Double clicking on any procedure name takes you immediately to the source for that procedure (Figure 4).

Connections are defined in much the same way as FTP Plus. However, with WTPS, you also create a structure to organize each development project. The WTPS distribution contains several sample projects employing a variety of languages that you can examine and learn from before creating your own projects. One minor annoyance -- the current version of the WTPS server uses AIFCHANGELOGON to do its magic. This has the unfortunate side effect of creating a wandering logon. AIFCHANGLOGON changes the "user.account" of the server job, possibly creating problems with job scheduling and monitoring software that depends upon "user.account" to manage batch processing. Whisper Technology has modified the Beta 2 release of WTPS (available by the time you read this) so that it uses the same approach as FTPMON, hence solving the wandering logon problem.

Current features of WTPS include:
€ Full featured editor with context-sensitive coloring, unlimited undo/redo, auto indenting, etc.
€ Multiplatform server support including MPE/iX and HP-UX
€ "Out of the box" support for multiple languages including Cobol, C, Pascal, SPL and Powerhouse
€ Customizable for additional languages
€ Specific MPE/iX support for Cobol COPYLIBs, QEDIT and other file formats
€ Number of open files and file size limited only by system resources
€ "Structured" view of programs supported
€ Real-time viewing of compilations
Some features planned for the production release but unavailable for our testing include:
€ Interface to Vesoft's MPEX and Security 3000
€ Auto highlighting and "jump to" on compile errors
€ Command execution window
€ Macro support
€ Manipulation of MPE file characteristics

Installation
FTP Plus can be downloaded as a 1-Mb ZIP file. Unzip it into an empty directory and run setup.exe to install it on your Windows 95 or Windows NT 4 desktop. Since I already had FTPMON running, that was all there was to it, and I was setting up "connections" within minutes of downloading the ZIP file.

Programmer Studio requires Windows 95 or Windows NT 4 on the desktop and MPE/iX 5.5 on the server. It does not use FTPMON, but has its own server process. The current beta release (at least Beta 2 by the time you are reading this) can be downloaded as a 1.3-Mb ZIP file. Unzip it into an empty directory and run setup.exe to install it on your desktop. Perform a WRQ labeled transfer of one of the resultant PC files to the HP 3000, do an MPE/iX RESTORE from the disk file and execute a setup script. Make any changes you need to the config file on the HP 3000 (the defaults worked fine for testing purposes) and STREAM the background monitor job. That's it.

Documentation
Documentation for FTP Plus consists of a minimalist Windows HELP file. It is adequate, but no more. Programmer Studio is still in beta and does not yet even have a Windows HELP file. Documentation is supplied by three "README" files, one with installation instructions for HP-UX, one with installation instructions for MPE/iX and a general information/user guide for Programmer Studio. Whisper Technology's Web site has a dozen or so screen shots showing WTPS in action that helped me get a feel for how to use the product. There are also several demos that come with the product and which are described in the "README" file.

Conclusion
The folks at Whisper Technology have a long history of working with the HP 3000, so I am confident that WTFTPP and WTPS will be kept up to date on the MPE/iX platform. Whisper Technology was very responsive when I pointed out the problems with byte stream files in Edit Plus and had a fix available for download within a couple of days. At $99 a seat, with quantity discounts available, Whisper FTP Plus is a great deal.

Whisper Technology is positioning Edit Plus as their entry-level editor, ideal for those who occasionally edit text files for tasks such as developing HP 3000-based web sites. Programmer Studio is designed for developers who spend much of their time programming. Since WTPS is still in beta testing, it is too early for me to wholeheartedly recommend it. However, given the planned functionality and what is already there in Beta 1, the $599 per seat (quantity one) price seems reasonable. If you do much development, it is definitely worth spending the few hours necessary to test drive it for yourself.

Whisper Technology is giving full credit for the original purchase price of FTP Plus in any upgrade to Programmer Studio. Furthermore, a purchase of Programmer Studio includes an FTP Plus license. Up-to-date pricing and product availability are on Whisper Technology's Web site, as is a downloadable 30-day free evaluation copy of each product.

Copyright 1997, The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved.