How JafSoft products are developed

Most JafSoft products are developed as C++ software under the OpenVMS platform, as this has been historically our development platform of choice.

This means that the text converters start life as command line utilities, and use little OS-specific code. In fact the C++ development environment under OpenVMS has historically lagged that on other platforms, meaning that the software tends not to be based on any bleeding edge technologies, meaning it is simpler to port to other Operating Systems (OS's)

As our converters are function rich, they support the use of "policy files" to contain all the options the user wants to apply. This generic mechanism allows all the choices available to the software to be exposed to the end user, allowing their intervention.

When ported to Windows, a GUI is grafted on top. What this means is that there is effectively an inner interface between the GUI code, and the core text conversion code.

The results of this development approach are as follows

• All of our text conversion products can be trivially offered as console applications, because that is effectively how they start life under OpenVMS.

As a result of that, all of out text conversion products can lend themselves to batch operation. In most cases we offer console versions of the software free to users who register the Windows version. Most of our Windows versions also support the command line to a limited extent.

• It has been possible to produce a largely OS-neutral software core, which aids portability of the software (without the GUI) between operating systems. When porting to a new OS the main areas of difference have been
  
  
  • support for file wildcards
  • support for command line parsing

Both areas have been addressed in many OS environments, with relatively minor changes to the core code.

So far our software has been run under

• OpenVMS
• Windows
• Linux
• Unix (Solaris)

but there's no reason to beleive it couldn't easily be made to run under other OS's, although you might need a source license to be able to do this.

• An API was easily developed, whereby the core functionality is made available to other applications. The API includes generic functions to manipulate program policies, this keeps the API simple, while still passing full control to the calling program. This approach is also generic enough to handle any future policies supported by the core software.

If you have any specific questions about any of the above, please contact developer@jafsoft.com

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