Announce: PHyLIS, Personal HyTime Link Information System

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 18:12 22/06/98 -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
>I'm am pleased to announce the initial availability of the beta version
>of PHyLIS: Personal HyTime Link Information System from
>"http://www.phylis.com".

This is marvellous news.

>
>NOTE: I realize that many of the readers of this group cannot or will not
>use anything other than Java.  I sympathize. I would very much like to

I think that for most of us it is 'cannot' - in some sense of the word.
There is - of course - no suggestion on XML-DEV that any language is
'inferior' to any other. 
(My 'cannot' relates primarily to portability - my community uses a variety
of beasts such as SGs, SUNs, Macs, etc. and we cannot require or expect
them to port languages to them just to run our apps.)

>create a Java version of PHyLIS, but that is beyond the limit of my
>abilities and resources as the moment. I chose VB largely because it was
>the easiest way for me to get the thing written, given my limited
>programming abilities and lack of time to absorb the Java learning curve.
>I also chose it because it is very accessible to a large number of people
>who may be fairly characterized as "casual programmers".  And of course,
>there's always the hope that maybe I might get Microsoft's attention....

The main thing - for people like me who know nothing about VB - is that it
is easily distributable. IOW, can I download it and install it on (say) W95
without having to download/buy lots of other stuff. [For example, if I want
to run SP on my machine I can download an executable without having to get
a C++ compiler. OTOH if I want to *develop* an application that links to SP
I need a C++ compiler. This was not trivial when I first wanted to do it.]
So - and this shows my ignorance of VB:
	- if I want to extend it/play_with_it, do I have to buy a VB
interpreter/compiler?

>
>Among the many things it demonstrates are:

[... wonderful things snipped ...]

If you can get help - as you note - to make the distribution as easy as
possible then we have little excuse for not finding out how HyTime works :-)

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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