In this column, we present information gleaned from the far reaches of the BASIS community. BASIS CEO George Hight talks about his travels to Germany, Amsterdam and Atlanta. CTO John Schroeder tells of his training in Colorado, as well as his trips to Italy and Germany.

Travels To Germany, Amsterdam And Atlanta
During the month of March, I traveled to Germany to join Herbert Schmitz, Falk Spitzburg and Peter Scholz in the BASIS GmbH booth at CeBIT. Herbert manages our German subsidiary, and Falk and Peter provide technical support to our German Customers. Falk and Peter have contributed greatly to the quality of BBj® by testing and using it in their applications.

For those who aren't familiar with CeBIT, it is the world's largest technology fair. German Customers traditionally attend CeBIT each year to see the latest in technology and conduct business while they are there. Nearly 700,000 visitors attended the 2002 event. Based on the status of this event, we determined it was an appropriate occasion for the BASIS German operation to introduce our latest BBj product.

BASIS GmbH Staff. Pictured left to right - rear part of photo, Herbert Schmitz, Falk Spitzburg, Peter Scholz.

While at the fair, I had the opportunity to visit the booth of BASIS's longtime partner, Schleupen AG. Arno Petzoldt, the manager of Scheupen, and I discussed how we could work together to expand the market for the new GUI release of their popular financial package. Günter Schröder demonstrated their latest Visual PRO/5® release of the Schleupen financial package that has a very modern GUI interface and extensive functionality.

Günter Schröder of Schleupen AG in Germany.

I also met with Albert Brink-Abler, the president of PRO DV. Albert and his talented development staff have been BBj pioneers, creating their new Nursery/Landscaping application, which they plan to release later this year.

While attendance at CeBIT was down from 800,000 attendees last year, our booth attracted many of our existing German Customers as well as potential Customers interested in the BBj development technology.

I traveled from the CeBIT fair to Amsterdam to attend the ENG Third Annual Pan-European Forum on Automotive Retailing and Distribution. The laws are changing with regard to how automobiles will be distributed and sold in Europe, and I knew that by attending this conference, I'd have the opportunity to further research these changes. I also wanted to support Audev, who is a development partner of ours and a primary sponsor of the conference. Audev demonstrated their new CarIT Dealer Management System (DMS), an application written in Visual PRO/5. Car IT is an application that accommodates multi-country, multi-currency, and multi-automobile makes, providing European car dealers an ideal application for complying with the changing laws.

The ENG conference afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate how the new File Maintenance Utility (FMU) from BASIS could be used on the Compaq Ipaq (pocket PC), using Microsoft Terminal Services (TS) to look up dealer information. The ability to get data from the CarIT DMS package using the BASIS FMU and wireless communications had a powerful impact. An attendee from Siebel, who was quite impressed with Audev's product and BASIS' technology, invited Audev to present at the Siebel Conference in April. (Incidentally, as the only American at the ENG conference, it was an eye-opener for me to learn that depending on which country they live in, Europeans have to pay from 30% to 280% in sales tax when they purchase a car.)

In May I attended the Perot Systems (formerly HSD) Diamond Users Group Conference in Atlanta. The conference was well attended by the users of the Diamond 725 product from Perot. The Diamond applications, which had been written in BBx 4 and upgraded to PRO/5, are used by many health maintenance organizations to process their medical claims. Perot Systems uses the Java BBjBridge (a feature of BBj Rev 2.0) to tie Oracle and PRO/5® systems together. Their Oracle-based product and the PRO/5 product are both serviced by a common Java front-end application. This application uses the Java BBjBridge to run PRO/5 programs and uses the BBj JDBC driver for data connectivity.

Each time I travel and meet with BASIS Customers, it is gratifying to experience the enthusiasm they exhibit for BBj. I believe the Java technology strategy is providing new life to the Business BASIC market, and I know it has instilled a renewed spirit at BASIS. It remains our intent to become even more involved in directly helping our Customers succeed in developing and marketing their applications.

  – George Hight

In early April, my travels led me to the small town of Barzano in beautiful Italy. There I conducted Visual PRO/5® and BBj® training for Customers of our Italian distributor, Ready Informatica. This was one of the more interesting and challenging trainings I have ever delivered, primarily because most of the students did not speak English. All the Italian I knew I learned from The Godfather. So, to put it mildly, we started with a communication problem. But the students all knew BBx® very well, and that became our lingua franca as we progressed through the class.

We started with "Hello World" in Visual PRO/5, which morphed to "Ciao mondo!" Our finale was a BBj GUIBuilder-based file maintenance program with a Finestra principale, or main window, using InputE controls for il Nome del Cliente, or the Customer name, il Telefono, and an InputN control for il Saldo, or the account balance, along with a list button for il Stato, or the State, containing a list of all the names of the States in the US. It was a bit of a mixed database, but they got the idea. I now have some sample GUIBuilder/ResBuilder code with Italian variable names and labels in my repertoire for anyone who needs them!

Roberto Viscardi and Loris Longhi at the training in Italy.

The class went surprisingly well, and the students were happy with their progress in GUI and BBj programming. One of the students, Loris Longhi, will be doing training for our clienti in Italy. Buona fortuna, Loris! Arrivederci e grazie!

Next I traveled to Germany, where I met with our German Business Manager, Herbert Schmitz, and one of our consultants, Peter Scholz. Fortunately, although my German is MUCH better than my Italian, Peter and Herbert are fluent in English. Communication was a lot easier!

Peter does a lot of training for BASIS in Germany and was interested in the BBj class we are developing at BASIS. Peter was particularly interested in using the new NetBeans-based BBjIDE, so we put together a NetBeans Quick Start Guide.

We also discussed the new examples of object coding contained in the online documentation. We have been using these examples as starting points for programs in the new BBj class. As was the case with the Italian students, Peter liked the fact that a student could copy an example from the online documentation, paste it directly into the NetBeans BBj Editor, save it, and press F6 to run the example. We will use this capability more as we move into Internet-based training.

After a long day working on the details of BBj training, I was the guest of Peter and his wife, Krista, at a Bob Dylan concert in Frankfurt. It was a great finish to my stay in Europe. Vielen Dank, Peter und Krista!

  – John Schroeder