An HP proposal that would have lead to a standard for HP 3000 graphical interfaces has been overwhelmed by a groundswell of products to improve the looks of MPE/iX programs.

HP’s Visage program, announced at HP World last year, will not be carried out as described, according to HP e3000 division (CSY) engineer Mike Yawn. At HP World, Yawn outlined a blueprint that would marry Java Foundation Classes with Legacy J’s BlueJ product as a preferred tool for giving 3000 apps a graphical look and feel. The required Java Foundation Classes were set to be included with all 3000s.

But Yawn said the division was impressed by what it saw at the HP World conference: the breadth of alternative products to deliver GUIs to legacy 3000 programs, especially those apps using the old VPlus standard. While the Java Foundation Classes will still give 3000 programs an interface that can be run from inside any Web browser that supports Java, CSY believes there’s more than one way to paint a screen in the 21st century.

“It’s looking to be a very robust market right now,” Yawn said. “The right thing for us to do is not try to take an official HP position on how you evolve forward from VPlus.”

The VPlus screen specification is in wide use in the e3000 base, but opinions differ on what share of the programs out there use VPlus. Some say as many as 70 percent of all MPE/iX programs use the workhorse spec, known as View screens to long-time programmers. VPlus looks old compared to Windows-like interfaces, and some 3000 customers are looking for its modern-day successor, a standard HP would distribute as widely and for free as it did VPlus.

Visage promised such a new standard, even though the plan introduced at HP World included the BlueJ $500-per-developer component from a third-party company. BlueJ is described as “a graphical application painter utilizing graphical and non-graphical program elements to create graphical application programs either in Java or COBOL” by Legacy J.

Yawn said last summer that HP liked the extensibility of using Java as the keystone of Visage.

“The neat thing about [Visage] being Java-based is that its tool palette is extensible — it’s not just coming with a hard-coded set of things from a vendor,” Yawn said at HP World. Visage would have made Java Beans — software components which are Java classes for APIs, binding and bridging, event-handling and persistent storage — a tool 3000 developers could use in programs.

In the months that followed, one company after another has brought solutions to market that serve the need to give e3000 applications a makeover. Some stick to the Java foundation HP admires, while others rely on Windows PCs, Visual Basic or other approaches.

“We felt it would be the wrong thing for us to say, ‘This is the one approved way to evolve forward from VPlus,’ ” Yawn explained. “There are a lot of other good ideas out there. This is one of these places where we need to let the market decide.”

Legacy J, the company which participated in the prototyping project for Visage last summer, “has picked up the prototype and continued working on it,” Yawn said. “They’ve gone a good bit beyond the prototype and put new functionality in there.” BlueJ has been joined by a new product from Legacy J, View J, which is communication middleware that intercepts VPlus calls.

Yawn also mentioned Minisoft’s forthcoming Web Dimension development tool as an example of the robust set of choices for adding GUIs to 3000 apps. “All the other products that were out in the HP World time-frame are still there, plus we’re seeing new [solutions] like the Web Dimension product.”

At the recent SIG3000 meetings in California, Minisoft outlined its product that will rely on Java — a design in step with the original cross-client GUI goals of Visage. Web Dimension will also let e3000 developers make use of Java Beans, and create Beans of their own for use with MPE/iX applications.

“There’s a lot of good stuff out there, and nobody knows about it yet,” Yawn said. “Competition causes all kinds of new things to happen in the marketplace. We’re encouraged to see that several people are going with Java on the client side.”