Introduction to Pathmaker

How Pathmaker Helps
Introduction to Pathmaker and Pathway
1–26 067867 Tandem Computers Incorporated
How Pathmaker Helps The Pathmaker product is a tool that helps create requester-server Pathway
applications for computer systems that use the Tandem NonStop Kernel. Before the
Pathmaker product was introduced, Pathway applications were often created
manually. The requesters and servers were hand-coded (written from the beginning
or modeled after an existing program). Even the files of Pathway commands that were
needed to run the application had to be created manually. Not only was this process
time-consuming and labor-intensive, it also made standards difficult to enforce and
large projects (involving many application developers) difficult to track and control.
The Pathmaker product helps overcome these difficulties in several ways:
It removes many of the labor-intensive coding tasks associated with creating the
requesters, servers, and command files composing a Pathway application.
It assists in customizing the development environment and in controlling and
managing the development effort.
It provides some application design assistance with the simulation feature.
This subsection discusses these features of the Pathmaker product in more detail.
Application Creation
Assistance
Using the Pathmaker full screen interface, application developers enter information
about the requesters (and their associated end user screens), the services, and the
servers that compose an application. This information is stored in a central location
called a catalog.
Application developers also use TEDIT to create files containing the COBOL85 or
C code that directs the services to perform database access, data manipulation,
calculations, and input validation. For applications that access a NonStop SQL
database, the Pathmaker product can be used to generate some SQL statements for
accessing the database.
Using the information in the catalog and the TEDIT files created by the application
developer, the Pathmaker product can generate the SCREEN COBOL requester source
code (including the code describing the end user screen), the server source code, and
the command files to configure and start the finished Pathway system for testing. (For
some applications, the Pathmaker product provides 100 percent of the server source
code; no creation of services is required.)