Introduction to Pathmaker

Approaches for Using Pathmaker
Using Pathmaker—An Overview
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Approaches for Using
Pathmaker
The Pathmaker product was designed to provide application developers and designers
with a great deal of flexibility. This flexibility allows the product to be used in
different ways for different situations.
Not only can the Pathmaker product be used to create production applications in a
formal and controlled manner, but it can also be used to design screen layouts before a
database exists or to quickly create a prototype of a production application. This
subsection presents several approaches for using the Pathmaker product and discusses
the best use of each approach.
Creating Production
Applications
In general, if the Pathmaker applications being created will be used to perform
functions that are critical to the operation of a business, a formal approach to
application development should be used. This is especially important if the proposed
application is large or if many application developers will be working together to
develop the application.
A formal approach generally means that a thorough and complete analysis and design
has been completed, and the database for the application has been designed before
work on creating the application begins. This approach also implies that the
development of the application is handled in an orderly and controlled manner that
allows the progress of application development to be tracked and documented.
Later in this section, a formal life cycle that can be used to develop production
applications is suggested. The phases of this life cycle encompass multiple tasks,
many of which can be accomplished with the Pathmaker product. The Pathmaker
Programming Guide provides the details of the tasks that should be completed using
this formal approach.
Designing Screens Although the Pathmaker product's main focus is simplifying the creation of Pathway
requester-server applications, it can be also used as a screen design tool. After a few
tasks to prepare the environment (such as installing the Pathmaker software and
adding a Pathmaker project) have been performed, application designers or
developers can quickly create Pathmaker requesters and then use the screen painter to
draw a proposed application's screens. These procedures can even be done before the
application database exists.
If the data for the application has already been defined in the Pathmaker catalog, the
Pathmaker product can use this information to create a default screen that application
designers or developers can modify with the screen painter. If no data has been
described to the Pathmaker product, application designers or developers can simply
use the screen painter to paint the screens, using decorations (for example,
underscores) to represent the data fields.