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Suppose you have a great application that (a) is written in AlphaBasic, (b) you would like to sell to every dentist or lawyer or insurance company or whatever in the country, but (c) the maximum you could charge for your application is $250. Since a single-user copy of A-Shell is $360, you're out of luck, right? Not necessarily. We offer a "light-duty" version of A-Shell called, appropriately, "AshLite," which might work for you. Or suppose that your UNIX/Linux-based application needs to run some PC-based program; how are you going to "talk" between your application and the PC process? Perhaps you could accomplish the needed functions and data transfers if you had an "agent" working for you on the PC. Once again, AshLite might be your answer. Sound good? Following is general description of AshLite. Please refer to the additional pages listed at left for more information. The complete AshLite Program Reference is a modest-sized document and is available from the documentation page, and the program itself can be retrieved from the other software downloads page.
AshLite Overview: AshLite is a simplified and reduced-function version of A-Shell/Windows. Its name indicates the developer's hopes for the product: one that is readily understood, quickly and easily deployed, and useful in all kinds of situations. There are esssentially two environments in which AshLite is appropriate: "Mini-Apps:" Single-user applications where the full-featured A-Shell--and all of its capabilities--is too big, too complex, and/or too expensive. "Agent" or "Server/Client" utilities, in which a non-Windows application running on a central computer sends a message to a Windows workstation initiating some process for which A-Shell is the best available process or application. The first category is easy enough to understand and thus doesn't require much further discussion here. Readers interested in using AshLite in this way will probably want to jump to the page entitled AshLite Compared to A-Shell/Windows, to determine if AshLite supports the functionality you need. Readers considering the second category should continue reading here. AshLite is designed to simplify the implementation of customized Windows utilities that can be invoked from an application running under UNIX, Linux (or even AMOS) via a Windows terminal emulator (such as ZTERM). In such environments consisting of a non-Windows server accessed via Windows workstations running terminal emulation, it is already common for the application to take advantage of the ability to launch Windows-based utilities on the client workstation, rather than trying to duplicate these utilities on the server. For example, to display a large amount of data in rows and columns, it makes more sense for the application to send the data to the workstation and launch a Windows spreadsheet program, such as Excel, than it does to try to write a text-based spreadsheet utility for UNIX or AMOS. The motivation behind AshLite comes from situations similar to the one just described, except where no off-the-shelf utility exists which performs the desired function in the desired manner. In these cases, the ability to create your own utility in a familiar programming language is ideal. Other such scripting languages exist, but the advantage of AshLite is that it supports the same programming language (AlphaBasic) that you are already familiar with, thus eliminating another learning curve as well as encouraging the sharing and re-use of existing code. And although AlphaBasic is a text-oriented environment, its implementation under A-Shell/Windows (and AshLite) provides numerous hooks, which simplify the incorporation of Windows GUI elements into your utilities. Need more info? Continue to:
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