Hello:

  here is the 1st unofficial release of the
Persistent Object Manager, which I intend to start
using asap to develop our data acquisition software.
After shaking it down I plan to release it to the
Component Pascal Collection, hence the prefix Cpc.
The package is fairly complete. There is a working demo.
There is a Quick-Start, the Sys-Map, and individual
module documentation. I took the liberty to write
the docu in a lighter style than the usual BlackBox
texts. The package is precompiled.

You will need to have the Gr installed to use the demo
because the graphics is done with Gr. In future we will
interface Robert's Lib to this manager as well. We need
the 2D plots for our data display, so Lib is on the menu.

I think I have broken more than a few BB design rules
with this software, but this does not bother me because
we need it asap. As discussed on the mailing list, I am
trying to get away with statically declared records rather
than pointers. This is motivated by the desire to use
the auto GUI builder, which only works with static records.
This decision percolated through the entire design.

There is certain ugliness, marked in blue, with Domains
which have caused the usual portion of pain. I suspect
I have not done a good job with InitDomain and Join.
I suspect that I am writing data to the output file
more than once, caused by cloning the stores with CopyOf
in a few places. I was getting TRAP 21 otherwise,
so I am not sure there is any other way, but I suspect
I am duplicationg data in the out files. This is not
a showstopper right now, but if true this is ugly.

This software looks not too bad on screen and it is
amusing to know that the design was largely determined
by the technical quirks such as the pointer/record problem,
as well as by the gaps in the BB documentation, which
only became apparent when I needed to find concrete info.
I will send a separate comment concerning the BB docu
at a later time.

In any case, the demo looks good and I hope it will
not trap on you. If it does please let me know.

Fyodor and other physicists will not be surprised,
but I want to mention to Wolfgang that this software
will solve a long standing problem of organizing
experimental display which only an experimental
physicist can appreciate. This is exactly what
we need to move forward with our projects, whether
one likes the programming solutions or not.

Good night and hope you will enjoy the demo.

Wojtek Skulski skulski@pas.rochester.edu
cord