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In this column, Consulting Engineer Dr. John Schroeder offers yet another colorful report. This time, John talks about
his training adventures in the Netherlands and Sweden. Also in this column, Director of Marketing Greg Grisham reports
on exhibiting with Open Systems Inc. at LinuxWorld in New York this past January.
In February, I visited The Netherlands and Sweden to conduct two training sessions on BBj®. The Netherlands
training took place in the small town of De Bilt, near Utrecht, in the center of Holland. We held a three-day class on
the elements of BBj. On the fourth day, we held an additional session, where students who had participated in a class
in November, joined us for a workshop on BBj programming. Six seasoned Business BASIC developers attended the class.
While all six were experienced with Business BASIC, four were more familiar with PRO/5® and Visual PRO/5®, and
two attendees were with a company in the process of converting from MAI Open BASIC to BBj.
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From left to right: Erwin van Aken, Kees Vis, and
Monique Aarts from Inter Access work on problem during BBj Class in Holland.
All-around, it was an excellent class. The participants were very impressed with BBj and will be using the features
they learned in the BBj training. The workshop on the fourth day was informative, both to me, and to the students. We
ended the day by writing a short program using the BBj _qres utility and Java TreeMaps to generate the code for objects
built from a resource. Writing this program gave the participants ideas on how to simplify their coding and gave us the
beginnings of a great utility program for BBj.
The class in Sweden took place in a suburb of Stockholm, Bromma.
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From left to right: Mattias Granström from Autotank
AB, John Gustin, HWTEC Data, Jan Sidenfaden, Q8 Denmark, and Michael Burkowski, BIT AB, attend BBj class in Sweden.
Again, we had several experienced PRO/5 programmers interested in learning about BBj. This training was similar to the
one in Holland except that the first day was spent entirely on installation and configuration of BBj, including
discussions about installing BBj on Linux and UNIX systems. The students were especially interested in BBj
configuration management from the Enterprise Manager.
The Swedes were quick to pick up the use of objects in BBj. They liked the way GUI programs can be built and managed
using objects, particularly the BBj Grid Object. They think that they can be very productive using BBj for their GUI
programming projects.
Autotank, a Swedish firm that supplies equipment and PRO/5-based software to the Kuwaiti Oil Company for managing their
gas stations, sponsored this class. (We sincerely appreciate Autotank for making this class possible for our Swedish
customers!). Overall, the European training tour was quite successful.
– Dr. John Schroeder
Like so many other high tech companies, BASIS has been involved in the rapid growth in the Linux marketplace. This
year, we decided we wanted to showcase some of our efforts and chose to exhibit at LinuxWorld in New York. To help us
in this endeavor we contacted our long-time customer, Open Systems Inc., to exhibit with us.
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Greg Rowland, Open Systems (left), and Greg Grisham, BASIS (right), greet LinuxWorld attendees visiting their booth.
LinuxWorld took place at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan, which is a world-class convention center. The
19,000-plus attendees enjoyed a great event. Based on the enthusiastic response we experienced, and on the quality and
volume of the show's attendees, there is little question regarding the acceptance of Linux in the IT world. All of the
major hardware and operating systems providers attended, aggressively marketing their wares.
There was an impressive display of server systems, networking options, and communications alternatives. In addition,
attendees had plenty of opportunities to review a variety of systems integration software. In short, there were
numerous production-level infrastructure tools for the Linux environment available for attendees to examine and
evaluate.
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Nico Spence, BASIS (left), and Dave Link, Open Systems (right), prepare exhibit booth for LinuxWorld.
The only thing missing from LinuxWorld was a comprehensive selection of business application software, which made BASIS
and Open Systems quite an attraction. This show allowed BASIS to reconnect with a number of customers and to meet with
new companies interested in our technology.
The popularity and maturity of Linux provides a wonderful opportunity for developers and vendors interested in
expanding their markets. Now is the time to deliver our products to this market, eager for new business applications.
BASIS-based Open Systems accounting software solutions received very favorable responses from the LinuxWorld attendees,
and we look forward to further developing this market segment in the future.
– Greg Grisham
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