Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Quick update: Irie Pascal 3.0 will support Unicode!

So what is Unicode anyway? Well, here is a paragraph from the Unicode home page that can serve as a short definition.

The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages.

You will probably agree that being able to “interchange, process, and display written text from diverse languages”, sounds like a good thing, but you probably don’t want to have to worry to much about the details. So the plan is for Irie Pascal 3.0 to follow the example of other programming languages like Java and C#, and use Unicode internally for all strings and convert as necessary when reading strings in or writing strings out.

The Benefits

The benefits of supporting Unicode are:

• Easy processing of XML and other text on the web.
• Programs can be written in any language (you will be able to use any language for variable names, comments, etc).

Learning about Unicode

I spent the last few days at the Unicode home page (the official source of information about the Unicode standard) learning about Unicode. What did I learn? Well, Unicode is complex, and the Unicode standard was not written to be easy to read or understand. I did learn enough to know that supporting Unicode is going to be both interesting and challenging.

I Ordered a book (about Unicode) from Amazon

I ordered this book, Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer’s Guide to the Encoding Standard, from Amazon. It looks good, hopefully it will be helpful.

The recent takeover attempt by Microsoft seems to have really scared the living daylights out of Yahoo, they are introducing new products as fast as they can.

Yahoo just introduced BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) which, as the name suggests, allows you to build a customized search product on top of the Yahoo search platform. Check out this TechCrunch article, Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS, for more information.

This is the third and final post in a series that previews what is planned for Irie Pascal 3.0 (the next major release of Irie Pascal). This final post previews my plans to release the source code to some parts of Irie Pascal 3.0.

Some parts of Irie Pascal 3.0 will be released as open source and others will be kept proprietary. The idea is to release the source code for those parts of Irie Pascal 3.0 where it is obvious that this is likely to benefit both the customer and Irie Tools. For example, the source code for the application run-time engine will almost certainly be released. Why? This allows customers and third-parties to port the run-time to many different operating system platforms without having to wait for me to do it. The customers will benefit from having more choices in operating system platforms to run their applications, and I get to focus on improving Irie Pascal 3.0.

The earlier posts in this series are

1. Irie Pascal 3.0: Pascal programming for the web.
2. Irie Pascal 3.0: Operating systerms supported.

This is the second in a series of very short posts giving a preview of what is planned for Irie Pascal 3.0 (the next major release of Irie Pascal). This post’s reveals which operating systems will be supported.

The dominance of Windows on the desktop made it an easy choice as the operating system to support for developing web applications. The only question was which versions of Windows to support. The plan is to support the three latest desktop versions, Vista, XP, and 2000.

The choice of the operating system to support for deploying the web applications, once they are built was more difficult, and came down to the following:

1. Windows Server (2003 and 2008)
2. Linux (Red Hat Enterprise)
3. FreeBSD

The decision that Apache will be the only supported web server pretty much eliminated Windows, so the choice was then between Linux and FreeBSD. Right now the plan is to support only Linux (probably only Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5).

This is the first in a series of very short posts giving a preview of what is planned for Irie Pascal 3.0 (the next major release of Irie Pascal). This post’s preview is that “it’s all abot the web”.

All about the Web and nothing but the Web

Irie Pascal 3.0 will be all about programming for the web and nothing else, while it may be possible to write non-web programs in Irie Pascal 3.0 this will not be supported. The idea is that it will be possible, and even easy in many cases, to write real production quality web programs using the Pascal programming language.

I was looking through the statistics for this blog today, and I noticed that someone had done a search on Google for “Irie Pascal” vista. So now seems to be a good time to apologize for the delay in updating Irie Pascal, and explain a little bit about why this is taking so long.

The main reason for the delay in updating Irie Pascal is that I have been working on a consulting project for the past few months. I am hoping to finish most of the work for this project by the end of this month (there is likely to be remaining work with integration, customer acceptance testing, and documentation for a few weeks after that). However the actual update to Irie Pascal should not take more than about two weeks, once I start.

Let me apologize again for the delay and ask everyone to bear with me a little longer.

See these earlier posts, Updating Irie Pascal for Windows Vista and Update: Irie Pascal, for more information about the coming update to Irie Pascal.

The Jamaica Business Development Centre is putting on the Small Business Expo 2008. See flyer below for details.

On the rare occassions (and by that I mean never) that I think about the recent Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) signed between the European Community and the CARIFORUM countries, I think about big industries and businesses trying to gain access to the EU market and vice versa. I do not think about small businesses like mine. So, recently when I got an invitation to a seminar to clarify the opportunities and challenges for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), presented by the recent EPA, I was less than enthusiastic.

To make things worse, the invitation then goes on to say:

At this seminar, MSMEs will have an opportunity to meet and interact with representatives from
the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM), the Delegation of the European
Commission to Jamaica, European diplomats and members of the Consular Corps representing
European countries.

I almost fell asleep just thinking about it. I thought the idea of an invitation was to make people want to go.

Anyway, I wish I could ignore this invitation, but it is obvious that this EPA is going to be very important, and unfortunately nobody seems to be in a hurry to explain to the public what was signed on our behalf. So how can I turn down an invitation to find out more? By the way, that’s a real question, please someone, tell me how I can get out of this?

Even the text of the EPA seems to be a secret (or at least well hidden). How hard can it be to put the document on a website and link to it?

I got an invitation a few days ago to a Speaker Forum at the Technology Innovation Centre (TIC), where the guest speaker is supposed to be the Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce. The invitation says to come & hear about:

• The Minister’s plans for the MSME sector.
• Policies that will address major challenges affecting business growth.
• Business incubation as a developmental tool.
• And much more.

I will admit that my first reaction to this invitation was “yawn, not another speech”. After all, why would the Minister say anything new about these important topics to such a small audience? But the more I think about it, the more curious I get. I have not heard the Minister say anything about these topics before, so anything he says will be probably be important (and some of it may even be interesting). I am also kind of curious to find out, exactly what is meant by a Speaker Forum. It sounds like a speech followed by a Q&A session, but maybe it will turn out to be something else.

The danger of course, is that I will go and get trapped at some kind of press conference that I would be better off watching on TV from the comfort of my favourite chair. Still, even that might be interesting (certainly it would be new for me). So on Monday I will see if I am not too late to accept the inivitation.

Well, I finally got around to testing Irie Pascal on Windows Vista and in general I was pleasantly surprised. Not only does Vista look great (by the way, be sure to check out the stunning screen backgrounds if you have not done so already), but Irie Pascal looks great on Vista as well.

As far as functionality goes, Irie Pascal ran almost perfectly on Vista, the only issue was the one I was expecting, Irie Pascal uses WinHelp for it’s online help but Vista does not include the WinHelp engine. As an experiment I downloaded the WinHelp engine from the Microsoft web site and installed it, but I ran into some weird problems. I can probably fix these problems but I think I am going to switch to the newer (and better) HTML Help engine instead. Actually, I am planning to update Irie Pascal so that it will support both WinHelp and HTML Help. Irie Pascal will use WinHelp on Windows 95 and Windows NT, and use HTML Help on the later versions of Windows.

I have spent the last couple of days experimenting with the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop, which I found to be (hmm what’s a nice way to put this) unsophisticated. Anyway, after some trial and error, I have learned enough to add support for HTML help to Irie Pascal.

After Irie Pascal is updated to support Windows Vista, I am planning to make some other changes before releasing the update (these other changes will mostly be about making it easier to write web applications).