🚀 go-pugleaf

Bryon Bronner writes:

> At the very least we are looking for some means to allow our users to
> stream report jobs on the 3000 from a SQLWindows Menu.  At the other
> extreme we would like to be to invoke system intrinsics.

Of your examples listed, WRQ's PPL probably comes closest to your desire,
but there are some others.  HP had some Co-operative Services, but I've
not heard a lot of noise about it recently.  Typically, I expect it would
require HP's Network Services 2.1 or ARPA Services.  So if you use a lot
of WRQ's Network Connection Series stuff, you'd at least need version
2.01 to support Sockets and/or Ticl.

If you are considering writing your own (ala NetIPC), then you are
probably better off using Sockets.  In this case there are a variety of
suppliers of transport to the 3000, besides WRQ, including MicroSofts own
TCP/IP for Windows for WorkGroup.  This little bargain is *REALLY* cheap
for a company, yet lets you talk to the HP3000.  Being non-3K specific it
doesn't know about HP's PROBE protocol, but this is only used to "find"
the box by Name.  You easily use a HOSTS file instead, or if you have a
Unix box on the network, Domain Name Servers will work fine.  Anyway,
WinSock support on PCs is found all over the place, but on the host, you
can write either in NetIPC or BSD Sockets (MPE/ix 4.0 or later).  BSD
pretty well demands 'C' or at least a good 'C' wrapper.  See Joe Cygan's
article in August Interact.  NetIPC works fine with SPL, and MPE/V.

One little trick, the sockets shipped on MPE/ix 4.0 *DOESN'T* work.  It
went out flawed.  Could only SEND and not Receive!  Sort of like
Write-Only Memory (WOM)!!!  Anyway patches are available, and described in
your SSB.

One final possibility to consider is using OSF's DCE RPC.  This little
group of TLAs stands for Open System Foundation's Distributed Computing
Environement Remote Procedure Call.  This is a design specification which
means any computer that supports DCE can make procedure calls to any other
machine that supports DCE.  As it turns out, DCE 1.5.1. runtime has been
supplied with 4.0 BUT NOBODY SEEMS TO KNOW ABOUT IT!  Turns out you have
to make a special request to HP IND to get the NIDL compiler and support
files, but its a *no charge* item.  Sounds like a fabulously well kept
secret, as I've not seen anyone taking advantage yet.

So if you wanted to try DCE what do you use on the PC?  Well it turns out
that on the Win/32 CD that Microsoft were providing for Windows NT, they
supply support for DCE as well!  What's more, this little ripper of a disk
contains DCE support for Windows AND DOS (besides NT, of course).  So, on
paper at least, you could design your RPC calls for Windows and have them
executed on a veritable plethora of other platforms.  I wonder though, for
your specification, what a "LISTF @.@.@" would do when executed on a VAX?

So maybe its overkill.  Maybe its unproved.  Maybe its a way to suck-up
all your spare time for the next 6 months.  But maybe it will be fun!

/Jim Wowchuk