Issue
100 November 1998
emWare
Top to Bottom
Part
1: Monitoring via the Internet
by
Fred Eady
There
may have been some good old days, but Fred’s not
necessarily one to live in the past. He’s reaching
into the future, and it’s looking like the future
relies heavily on control via the web. Join him
for a look at emWare’s offering.
Start
•
emWare
Components
• The
Gatekeeper
• Coffe
Break
• Preparing
To Program
•
Sources
and PDF
Remember
getting that first programmable calculator? Beat the
crap out of that old slide rule, huh?
Remember
that first contact with a BBS? The Internet makes all
that look a little silly now, doesn’t it?
Well,
pretty soon, if not already, you will be making first
contact with your first web appliance. If you keep up
with the movies, all of the "first contacts"
were pretty much unexpected. Some were catastrophic.
I’m
going to change all of that here. A beginning look at
what it takes to control and monitor your application
via web browsers is right behind this paragraph.
Before
I begin, I want to point out that there are at least
two other products out there that are similar in nature
to the one I’m going to discuss in this article.
The
first—Phar Lap’s HTML-On-The-Fly, which is
included with the Embedded ToolSuite—is a unique
implementation that enables you the programmer to assemble
web pages as they are requested. Phar Lap’s version
of web control comes wrapped within a very comprehensive
development package that is now capable of using Bill’s
latest C++ compiler package.
Another
web runner comes from Agranat. EmWeb’s claim to
fame is the elimination of the CGI and the melding of
C and HTML. If you include EmStack, a TCP/IP stack,
you don’t even need an OS to implement EmWeb.
As
you can see, the control-by-the-web marketplace is growing
rapidly. I intend to explore as much of it for you as
possible, but for now, let‘s concentrate on another
contender in this area, emWare.
A
5000' VIEW
I
really struggled coming up with a way to convey the
new features of emWare’s latest release. After
a few days of reading and thought, I figured the best
way was to show you what I saw on the screens and describe
the code that was generated by interacting with those
screens.
It’s
going to take a couple of passes, but by the time we
realize our goal, you will have generated your own ideas
as to how to integrate EMIT technology in your own projects.
And, you’ll garner enough basic EMIT knowledge
to implement the package on your own.
The
newest release from emWare takes advantage of today’s
object-oriented software technology to ease the emWare
application-development process. Symantec’s Visual
Café has been incorporated to make emWare’s interface
design much easier and more intuitive.
Also,
instead of building emWare tables by hand as we did
in the early days of EMIT, an upgraded package utility
that uses a standard .ini file structure does all of
that work for you.
And
now, the developer can use Bill’s Internet Explorer,
as well as a plug-in–enhanced Netscape as end-user
browsers. (I don’t think the Justice Department
had a say in this one.)
These
are just a few of the enhancements in the latest edition
of emWare. Let’s get started by installing the
new version of EMIT and all of its co-hosts. Photo 1
is where it all begins.
