You may recall that in December, we announced that we were beginning to re-write the entire suite of PICS software. We are very excited to announce that the first version is ready for installation. Please contact us if you would like to have it installed on your system, and we will gladly do so at no charge to you.
In the first version, we have the customer screen only. We realize that this is only a very small part of PICS. But we wanted to get one screen in the hands of our customers as we work on the “back end” parts of the system so as to maximize the amount of time for customers to give us feedback. When you use this screen, you will see that it looks very similar to the existing version. This was one of our goals. We want your users to have minimal changes to deal with when switching from PICS in FoxPro to PICS in Java.
Our team of students from Sheridan have been a huge help in getting us to where we are today. They worked on the system from January through May, and one of them (Denis) has been hired for the summer to work on it full time. Many thanks to Denis, Aaron, Ian and Kyle for your efforts. We look forward to having you all back in September to continue this project.
We would also like to thank Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manager in the Oracle Developer Tools group for coming here in March (from his home in Amsterdam) to give us some in depth training on the NetBeans platform. We look forward to having him back again in the fall for another round of training.
We would also welcome beta testers … please email fcwaud@waudware.com to let us know if you are interested.
On the technical side – We had said that this new version would work in parallel with your existing version of PICS. We have achieved this. All the code is written in Java, and it uses an ODBC connection to access the FoxPro data that you use every day. In our preliminary testing, we have found that the new code is actually faster than PICS. This is great news both for you and for us.
There is a lot more information to share. We welcome your feedback and invite you to become a beta tester today!
