Recital Visual Developer - Transform existing terminal-based Recital, FoxPro, FoxBASE and Clipper into GUI Web Enabled Applications

Powerful Visual Development
Recital 9 Visual Developer is a complete Windows-based suite for the development and deployment of graphical .NET client/server applications. It includes the Recital Enterprise Studio integrated development environment (IDE) for building and maintaining Recital 4GL applications with Web, Windows and terminal user interfaces. Recital 9 Visual Developer wraps the powerful new visual Recital Enterprise Studio IDE around the Recital 4GL. Using Recital 9 Visual Developer, you can:

For building Web and Windows applications, Recital 9 Enterprise Studio provides all the tools you need to develop, test, debug, and deploy Recital 4GL applications, allowing rapid prototyping and a shorter development time.

New Environments for Recital, FoxPro, FoxBASE and Clipper Applications
As a companion product to Recital 9 Terminal Developer, Recital 9 Visual Developer lets you migrate existing server-centric Recital, FoxPro, FoxBASE and Clipper applications to modern computing environments. With Recital 9 Visual Developer, you can:

Leverage Your Existing Investment
With Recital 9 Visual Developer, Recital, FoxPro, FoxBASE and Clipper skills and experience are reusable, because the Recital Database and 4GL Engine is the underlying engine of Recital Mirage and is an integral component of the Mirage Application Server for your client/server applications. Your existing code and data is reusable because the Mirage Application Server is compatible with Recital, FoxPro, FoxBASE and Clipper. And your existing Windows, OpenVMS, Linux, and UNIX server hardware environments are reusable when redeploying your existing application to an open, portable, client/server environment.

Works with other Recital 9 products
As an integral member of the Recital 9 product family, Recital 9 Enterprise Studio provides a Windows-based IDE for building and maintaining business applications. When used in conjunction with the Recital 9 Database Server, you can open up your data to third-party access using our Universal ODBC Driver, Universal JDBC Driver or our Universal .NET Data Provider.

Save on Your Development Time
Compared with traditional visual development tools Recital 9 Enterprise Studio can dramatically reduce the time taken to build, deploy and enhance robust and scalable client/server, terminal-based and Web-based applications. The advanced Code Editor reduces coding time dramatically with features that display color-coded syntax, block indent, comments, bookmarks, and shortcuts. Additionally, the Code Editor incorporates IntelliHelp technology to decrease coding time by using powerful, extensible language assistance as you type including automatic statement completion.

Windows, Web and Terminal Solutions
Recital 9 Enterprise Studio, using the Mirage Application Server (the Universal Data/Application Server), enables both thin-client and terminal-based solutions to be built and maintained in a visual environment. When used with the Recital Mirage .NET Client, Recital 9 Enterprise Studio also enables Web-based applications to be quickly built and deployed.

Open, Portable Applications
Recital 9 applications can be deployed to a mixed environment of PCs and servers�all from the same source code. This translates into productivity advantages and faster delivery of applications when business environments change.

Project Manager
Use the Project Manager to organize and manage all files in a project.

Powerful graphical debugger
The graphical program debugger supporting breakpoints, variable watchpoints, execution history tracing, call stacktrace, and dynamic views of variables and database tables during program execution.

Synchronize files with your application server
Team development features with file versioning and synchronization conflict management.

Rollback to previous versions of files in your project
The Version Control Manager lets you view previously edited versions of files on the server and roll back to or roll forward to other versions.

Command Window
Interactive "Command" panel for interacting with the Mirage Application Server at development time.

Recital 9 Visual Developer Components

From version Recital 9.1 onwards, all Recital products benefit from the inclusion of the Recital Enterprise Studio IDE. Recital Enterprise Studio is a common application development workbench used to develop, debug, and deploy Recital 9 Terminal, Graphical, Web and Database Server applications across multiple platforms including Windows, Linux and UNIX. Please click here for a tour of Recital Enterprise Studio.

The Mirage Application Model

With Recital Visual Developer you can develop distributed database applications that are logical partitioned into three fundamental layers:

The Mirage distributed application model consists of a Recital Mirage client that communicates with a Mirage application server (running on Windows, Linux, UNIX or OpenVMS) containing the application business logic (the program files). The application, in turn, communicates with a database that supplies and stores data.

Presentation Services
The presentation layer, the thin client (Web browser) is rapidly becoming the interface of choice for many developers. A developer is able to build business logic that can be executed on any of the three application tiers. With Recital Mirage internet applications, the thin client is able to provide a visually rich, flexible, and interactive user interface to applications. Thin clients also have the advantage of providing a greater degree of portability across platforms.

Business Logic/Application Server
This layer is handled by the Recital Mirage Application Server using the Recital Universal Data/Application Server (the UAS), which is available for Windows, Linux, Unix, and OpenVMS. The Recital Mirage Application Server, in turn, can interact with several data services on the data access layer.

Business logic that resides on the application server can be written in :

Features and Benefits

Migrate Existing Recital, FoxPro and FoxBASE Applications
Because Web technologies are rapidly becoming the platform of choice for supporting enterprise-wide applications, the infrastructure required to develop and host applications has grown in scale and complexity. The Recital Mirage platform is the direct result of a major shift in the computer application architecture that took place during the 1990s. Recital Mirage provides the ability and capability to run existing Recital, FoxPro and FoxBASE applications as client/server applications in a web-centric environment.

Extend and Enhance without code changes using XML templates
The Recital Mirage client can transform existing character mode forms into modern GUI ones without the need for making code changes to the existing application logic. This is accomplished by describing "Transformation rules" in XML template files that can be system-wide or form-specific.

No Application Logic is Downloaded to the client
Recital Mirage applications run on the server. The user interface layer is handled by the Recital Mirage client. No application logic needs to be downloaded to the client. This makes for a "wafer-thin" client that can run on a wide range of .NET or Java enabled devices.

Integrate legacy applications with Microsoft Office
The Recital Mirage application server running on Linux, Unix, Windows and OpenVMS servers provides powerful document sharing facilities, and the ability to interact with Microsoft Office on windows client desktops. For example, you can create reports in Excel or Word by creating text files on the server that are transparently sent to the client, which then imports them into Excel or Word and then runs the associated application on the desktop.

Build database driven websites
The Recital Mirage application server provides facilities for storing and retrieving binary files from tables on the server and executing the associated application on the windows desktop. These facilities can substantially enhance legacy applications.

Non-intrusive deployment
The Recital Mirage client can act as a standalone executable file or can be embedded within a web page. Additionally, the Recital Mirage client acts as a user-interface layer within a three-tier application. By connecting to the Mirage Application Server, Recital Mirage clients are capable of acting as the front end to a powerful, data-enabled architecture that leverages the rich user interface of a client application with the advanced processing of an application server running existing Recital, FoxPro, or FoxBASE applications on Windows, Linux, Unix or OpenVMS application servers. Code changes made to the application are effective immediately and no client application software updates are required. For large scale web-based applications, this is a fundamental requirement and reduces the application support costs significantly.

Key Features of the Mirage Application Server

	Backwards compatible with earlier versions of Recital, FoxPro 2.6, SCO FoxBASE, Clipper and dBase
	Cross-platform Visual FoxPro 8.0 compatible SQL with local cursor engine including all SQLxxx() functions
	Visual FoxPro 8.0 language and function compatibility
	ANSI SQL syntax compliant
	Navigational and SQL data access
	Active Data Dictionary
	Supports stored procedures, triggers and user-defined functions written in Recital, Visual FoxPro or any .NET language
	Broad cross-platform support; Windows, Linux, UNIX, and OpenVMS
	Row level locking
	Low-level ISAM C API for high performance C/C++ embedded non-server database access
	ODBC compatible C API for C/C++ embedded non-server database access
	Full text indexing and searching
	Complete support for SQL subqueries
	Extensible using dynamically loadable C function and class libraries
	Flexible security system with command-level and column-level protection on a per user/group basis
	Integrated XML language support providing Microsoft ADO.NET XML data import and export
	Built-in Client/Server capabilities with universal data access via open system gateways
	Very Large Databases (tables larger than 2GB) up to 2^63 bytes
	Nested transactions
	Enhanced database security with built-in DES3 encryption
	Supports transparent file upload and download facilities
	Can operate as a web-server to serve dynamically generated HTML pages and then display these in the client PC web browser
	Provides document sharing facilities with Microsoft Office for sharing word documents, spreadsheets etc.
	Provides for the activation and interaction with Windows .NET Forms on the client PC
	Supports client-side and server-side printing

System Requirements

Large File Support is available for Windows, Itanium HP-UX and Linux. Linux Large File Support requires glibc >= 2.2 and an ext2 file system

Product Overview

Recital 9 Visual Developer Components

The Mirage Application Model

Features and Benefits

Key Features of Recital Enterprise Studio

Key Features of the Mirage Application Server

System Requirements