A quartely publication of Inmark Development Corporation

News

Volume 1, No 2 -- Fall 1994

Now Available: zApp 2.2 with DLL Support.

Version 2.2 of zApp and the zApp Interface Pack for Windows, Win32, and OS/2 are now shipping. zApp 2.2 allows both zApp and the zApp Interface Pack to be compiled as Dynamic Linked Libraries. You can also take zApp code that you've written and place it in a DLL. Previously, zApp supported static linking only.

The primary advantages of DLLs are that code from the library is loaded at runtime, instead of being physically linked into the application, and the DLL code can be shared among multiple applications. This means that if you run three applications built with the DLL version of zApp, there will be only one copy of the zApp library code present in memory. By building your own DLLs you can share your common object classes between applications, minimizing the overhead in memory and on disk.

Call Inmark Sales at 1-800-3INMARK for more details about how to get version 2.2.

Dear C++ Developer:

1995 will be a pivotal year for application developers. In addition to the wide variety of operating systems and environments currently available, system vendors will be releasing a number of new versions. These include Windows 95 (formerly known as Chicago) from Microsoft, CDE and Motif 2.0 from OSF (which will be released by IBM, HP, Sun, etc.), and OS/2 3.0 from IBM (which should be released late this year). While these new systems will present you with many exciting development opportunities, the ease with which you can support the platforms of tomorrow will be determined by the development tool choices you make today. This choice is even more important for developers wanting to support multiple platforms, because while there are a number of tools that provide portability, these products differ widely not only in their capabilities, but more importantly in their architecture -- or how they provide these capabilities.

Evaluating the architecture of portability tools is not simply an academic execise of little importance to the application you are building. On the contrary, in the same way that a skyscraper cannot be built on the foundation of a house, substantial applications cannot be built on the foundation of an unstable or convoluted architecture. The architecture of the tool upon which you build the foundation of your application will determine where you can go in the future.

To aid in understanding the various architectures for cross-platform development, this issue of zApp News features an article that explores the most common approaches. Also included is information on the release of zApp 2.2, which adds the ability to use zApp and the zApp Interface Pack in DLL form, as well as to build your own DLLs.

We have a number of exciting events coming in the next couple of months. Take some time and browse through the newsletter and find out about our products, training, support, and the events we will be involved in. You will also see a bit on some of our most important assets -- our customers. Please give us a call if you have any questions, or if you would like to reach me, send email to howard@inmark.com.

Cordially,

Howard Love
President and CEO

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