UniVerse Objects is an extension of Visual Basic which lets
VB interface with a UniVerse RDBMS Environment
It was in 1998, after over ten years toiling
in character-based programming environments that I
emerged fresh from Visual Basic and Advanced
Visual Basic at BCC with an 'A' in each.
Now I could create some slick GUI --
get away from the old-fashioned, dull green screens.
We could give the user community what they wanted,
the same ease of interface for our vast inventory
of homegrown applications that the users were finding in
the Windows applications that they had been using
for years already.
Indeed, I could come up with some fancy interfaces. That
is real fine, the UC said, but show us some of our data.
Where is the data going to come from?
Yes, this is a UniVerse shop running over DG/UX. The data
the folks want to see is over on a Unix box.
At first, I would write back end programs to port the data
over to a Windows machine and work from there. Soon, that
got to be cumbersome and inefficient. We needed some sort
of an ODBC link to the Unix Server which could allow us to
see our data real-time from a user-friendly Windows desktop.
Finally, after upgrading to UniVerse 9.41 from 7.3.3.1,
we discovered that we could also install UniVerse Objects
from the CD. Alex Vlassis, my boss Ron Engelhardt and
myself began having the time of our lives developing
exciting apps which combined the ease of the Windows
interface along with the flexibility that a MultiValue
database allows.