John Schroeder, BASIS chief technology officer, followed George Hight's opening address at TechCon97 with a high-level overview of the Volcano technology strategy. The following is a summary of his speech.

Volcano is a multi-year technology strategy that embodies the BASIS vision of the future. Its goal is to launch a new era for Business Basic by opening up the structure and expanding the capabilities of the Business Basic language. This new era of products offers increased programming productivity and more sophisticated support for multi-tier, client/server solutions on Windows and UNIX platforms.

Using the new tools, developers can become a part of larger solutions with leading vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle, expand sales to current customers, and win a piece of the lucrative mid-range business market. The result is an eruption of opportunity for you and for BASIS.

The Volcano product strategy encompasses five products and is divided into three distinct phases. We are kicking off phase I at TechCon97 with the release of the Kilauea Early Access version. This release of a product still under development gives you the biggest possible head start in using new features today. With Early Access, you can start planning how to enhance your applications tomorrow.

Phase II of Volcano, the Pinatubo and Cabezon products, break the current monolithic structure of the Business Basic language into components and begin the transformation of BBx® into an object-oriented language. They also give you the power to scale your applications into the most advanced three-tier client/server systems. Phase III, Capulin and Fuego, complete the evolution of Business Basic to an object-oriented language and component-based development system.

Phase I - Kilauea PRO/5®

Kilauea, which we can now reveal as Visual PRO/5™ 2.0 and PRO/5 2.0, makes migrating character-based applications to the GUI environment even easier. Kilauea offers Windows developers new visual programming features to speed up development. At the same time, Kilauea provides file system enhancements that benefit both Windows and character-based developers.

Kilauea adds major Windows control enhancements specialized for business applications development. These include GRID, TAB, INPUTE/INPUTN, and a Windows- standard Print Preview interface. Kilauea developers can now call Print Preview to display a report onscreen, zoom and scroll through the preview, and print-all without writing additional code. A Message Box control allows creating simple Windows-standard dialog boxes.

Three new 32-bit utilities for Windows, ResBuilder™, DDBuilder™ and the Program Wizard, make GUI development easier. ResBuilder offers an intuitive tree-based, Explorer-style interface for creating graphical resources. Its toolbars and property sheets provide quick visual creation of interfaces. ResBuilder supports all controls and menus available in the Visual PRO/5™ mnemonic set.

DDBuilder is a graphical data dictionary builder, giving developers tools to quickly create BASIS data dictionaries for centralized data definition and provide access via the BASIS ODBC Driver™. A Program Wizard rounds out the list of new utilities, offering programmers a point-and-click wizard that generates complete GUI file maintenance and report programs using SELECT and SQL statements.

Kilauea file system enhancements increase file size and improve file access speed. Now you can use MKEYED and string files up to 4GB in size on certain platforms, such as HP-UX 10.20. String file access speed is improved up to 30% depending on platform. Licensing is less burdensome on systems using FacetTerm, because multiple sessions on the same terminal now count as one user. Multiple sessions in which one Kilauea session invokes another are also supported.

Phase II - Pinatubo and Cabezon

In Phase II of the Volcano product strategy, PRO/5 allows separating code into multi-tier components: the front end, the business rules, and the file system or database. This componentized structure allows BASIS products to work with other leading software and database products, such as Visual Basic and Oracle 8. Above all, it retains the strength of the Business Basic language-the business rules processing component-the true heart of any business application.

Pinatubo, the first Phase II product, brings components to the UNIX and DOS platforms. Pinatubo separates the BBx interpreter from the file system and modernizes the BBx language. The interpreter supports object variables and a fresh, efficient and readable language syntax, along with a C++ interface and many other innovations.

The file system can be called from a Business Basic program or a non-BASIS application to provide the industry's most cost-effective data store. Component structure means you can write a Web browser front end that communicates with a BASIS business processing core driving an SQL database. You have the freedom to combine the business processing in Business Basic with the front end and database components that work best for you. Pinatubo supports SQL core compliance, including Extended Fetch and Cursors. (For more information on Pinatubo, please see "Pinatubo: A More Open Business Basic".)

Cabezon provides a complete integrated development environment (IDE) built on the Pinatubo interpreter and file system. This single environment offers a graphical editor, complete debugging tools, and plug-in ResBuilder and DDBuilder utilities. Cabezon developers will be able to use third party components such as OCX and ActiveX controls in PRO/5 applications. (For more information on Cabezon, please see "Cabezon, the IDE for Business Basic Developers".)

Phase III - Capulin and Fuego

Phase III of the Volcano product strategy brings PRO/5 into the world of component development. Capulin provides embeddable Business Basic software components. OLE/COM interpreter and file system objects allow you to build and distribute PRO/5 applications anywhere within a corporate computing environment. Fuego's advanced IDE runs on top of the Capulin OLE/COM objects.

The Business Basic Volcano is again on the verge of another eruption, another period of radical growth and change. Kilauea Early Access release is the first phase of this evolution toward flexible, component-oriented development tools with strong support for Windows migration. Further Volcano products, building on each another, promise a Business Basic that is open, object-oriented, and supports multi-tier and client-server applications. Volcano opens substantial new markets and new opportunities for you and for BASIS.