A leview of the APL2006 Conference --by Mark E. Johns ORLANDO,FLORIDA, NOVEMBER 3-5 '~HE APL2000 CONFERENCEWASMYFroST ONE. I was very impressed with the whole program and I know I got a lot out of it. It seemed like we were always busy learning or talking APL--exactly what you want from an APL conference. I went away stimulated and constantly thinking about the new features and the future use of APL. I met many interesting people and felt privileged just to talk with some of the gurus of APL. Eric Baelen gives opening remarks on the history of APL2000 and LEX2000 ¢ Rich Krafchin confers with Warren Baelen (center) and Kevin Weaver I thought Fred Waid's enthusiasm about the future of APL and the Internet was contagious. I liked that Eric Baelen not only talked about APL 3.x but also that they are already working on and thinking about APL 4.x. Patrick Parks's presentation about what is to come, using APL as a server/COM object was very encouraging and exciting in its own right. Scottie Elmslie's presentation on his APL work for Ryder further baekecl up the idea that one APL'er can do the work of 10 programmers in another language. Rick Butterworth had a very nice data warehousing product. Data warehousing seems to be an ideal problem to solve in APL, something he is having fun doing, it seems. A software package called Package Works, written by Rich Krafchin, was another impressive piece of work. I think everybody that saw his presentation was impressed with what a little creativity can do for a software package. Rich is the only developer of Package Works; it's hard to imagine any single developer doing the kind of work he did in another programming language. I didn't get to see Gary Bergquist's original presentation but it seems that the people who did were actually entertained and a bit enlightened by whatever he said, including Eric Baden. The [3NI function was a topic of great interest. Michael Steiner and Mark Osborne gave a very good overview of how to use it and what its capabilities are. Bill Rutiser gave a talk on OCX's and COM objects that really cut through to what you need to know without getting into the details too much. I'm glad Bill and Patrick are doing this COM object stuff for us so we don't have to learn all the things that Bill and Patrick can make irrelevant for us. A few goodies: ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ Template for typing APL characters in a Microsoft Word document Squad primitive function for indexing Multi-media control User can move columns in 'Listview' control ] DLLTREE--shows what DLL's are used by a given DLL and which ones aren't found ] EMSG--meaningful error messages for OCX errors APL as a "server" COM object (Patrick's discussion) Accepting and sending [3NI statements (APL-to-APL) Non-APL cfient can access APL data through a driver written by APL2000 which also utilizes DNI; this can be "ODBC comphant" Mark E. ~ohns may be reachedat "mark_johns@emaiLmsn.corn". APL QuoteQuad

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