The NewWave design Management Faci...

The NewWave design Management Facility

THE NEWWAVE view MANAGEMENT FACILITY (OMF) provides the HP NewWave environment with a sophisticated object-based file arrangement The objectives for OMF can be translated into the following features:

* Focus upon Tasks. Our initial designs of a user interface for the NewWave environment clearly indicated that an existence model could help solve many question s An object model allows a user to dispose of more time thinking about the task to be done and les about to what degree to get the computer to do it. The OMF helps by the agency of providing a file system for storing objects

* mingle multimedia objects. The OMF is privationed to keep track of all the relationships between percepts This knowledge can e used to manage intermix objects as an integrated whole.

* Data sharing. OMF supports automatic data transfer with equal reason that new data can be registered in one place and then propagated to all the other places it is used.

* digest sharing. OMF helps the application designer from making it easier to write and use reusable digest The NewWave environment uses this ability to provide many plan services that can be plugg into applications.

* Evolution versus revolution. Use of the OMF does not require developing applications in a completely different way. popular development languages and tools can be used. OMF also posts on the current generation of hardware and software platforms. in the greatest degree important, the basic OMF features scale self-same well into the more sophisticated increase environments that may exist in the future

OMF Concepts

thing perceiveds and Classes

A NewWave user uses [i]or[/i] complements for the storage of data. Examples of marks include folders, documents, spreadsheets, and charts. Each thing perceived is a set of data files joined with an application program that is capable of processing those files. Many different drifts with different data files can be confine to the same application program. designs that share an application program in this way are of the same class (see Fig. 1)

just discovered classes are installed into the OMF with an installation script that is written by the agency of the application developer. This script contains all the information the OMF penurys to create and use designs of the new class. A user single needs to know the name of the script file, and the quietness of the process is automatic.

There are sum of two units basic kinds of objects: global and user. Global realitys are used to represent fixed entities in the order such as a printer or wastebasket. Global realitys are installed with the order and cannot be copied or ravage with fire and sworded by the user. Global thing perceiveds can be referenced by any thing in the system, and are many times used to provide some used by all service to the other drifts global objects that are visible to the user to organize and contain data. User thing perceiveds can be copied, moved, and devastateed by the user.

a certain quantity of object-based systems allow objects to be used at a remarkably fine level of granularity--for example, a separate mark for each character of a document. In the OMF design, we took a more pragmatic approach and decided that correlates should be used to set forth larger entities, such as whole charts and reports. This approach allows applications to be programmed more conventionally, and is les demanding of hardware and software resources. OMF provides a excessively rich integration between these larger objects

The data files associated with an particular are just ordinary files in the MS-DOS[r] file order The names of these files are generated automatically from the OMF and are not go intoed by or displayed to the user at any time. To optimize performance, the OMF automatically distributes the data files among a number of internal subdirectories that are created and maintained for this purpose

All NewWave files, data and executables, are kept in MS-DOS directories separate from the user's other files. This allows the same storage convolution to be used for other projects and makes it easier to archive and restore the NewWave portion of the file system

Properties

Properties are chunk of data used to store descriptive information about intentions and classes--for instance, the name of a class of thing perceiveds or the last time an existence was modified. Fig. 2 illustrates a typical object and class properties.

Each [i]or[/i] complement has a list of properties associated with it. An application can read or write the data associated with a one's own by specifying the object and the name of the estate There is also a possessions list associated with each installed class. The properties in a class estate list are common to all correlates of that class.

wealth names can either be strings, of the like kind as MyProperty, or numbers. Numeric names show the advantage of being more efficient to access and store.

A number of properties, of the like kind as the object title, have been standardized in the same manner that they can be used by means of all applications. Some of these standard properties are listed below. The OMF also allows application developer to define their be in possession of private properties.