DEC is continuing to polish up its computer-aided software engineering act as it pursues its strategy of becoming a software and services company. To wit it has made some software tools announcements (CI No 1,589), unveiling DEC Fuse – Fuse standing for Friendly Unified Software Engineering – which is a visual tool-set for DECstation and DECsystem environments; a suite of Ultrix RISC language compilers and additional third-party software tools for the Ultrix RISC environment; as well as announcing that VAXset tools will be rewritten by the second half of this year to be portable across all DEC environments and will then be renamed DECset. Geoff Roach, European Cohesion marketing manager, says that as regards the cuts that DEC is implementing (CI No 1,588), he is not aware of any planned impact on IBM’s CASE products or development because they are big revenue generators and help sell hardware. Fuse is important because it provides a uniform DEC OSF/Motif-based user interface for all of DEC’s Ultrix software tools, ensuring that Motif replaces DECwindows over time. This suite of lower-CASE tools for Windows offers, among other things, a graphical program builder that sits on top of the Unix Make utility to help developers compile software, its debugger can transform a set of dbx debugger commands into push-buttons, while the Call Graph Browser displays program calling structure and a code manager based on the Unix utility Source Code Control System, SCCS. For example, you can bring C code into Fuse and the Call Graph Browser will execute the program presenting a graphic picture as it does so. The product works for the benefit of project managers, enabling them to keep a centralised overview on application development so that they can spot bugs and system dependencies that don’t work. Using Fuse, DEC believes, the time that’s required to develop Windowing systems can be dramatically reduced, from, say, a fortnight to two days. DEC believes that the product will make Motif applications much more popular as it cuts out a lot of the requirement for specialised development knowledge. Furthermore, as the underlying User Interface Language is the same for all Open Software Foundation members, Fuse can run on other vendors’ workstations as well as offering users the ability to convert DECwindows applications for Motif, since DECwindows and Motif share the same Interface Language. Fuse is priced at UKP1,460 and will ship in March. It currently supports DEC’s C, Fortran and Pascal compilers for Ultrix and is ready to support C++, although no announcement has yet been made to this effect. It can be used with any database management system, but at present Ultrix SQL is the preferred option. Finally, DEC announced that Cognos Inc’s Powerhouse and Computer Associate International Inc’s CA-DB:Generator are now available under Ultrix.
