On Thu 03 Nov 2005 at 05:10AM, Joe Gainey wrote:
> What is the proposed alternative for a menu generation language to be
> shipped with solaris. many companies still utilize text based menus
> to provide key functions within thier enterprise. a more modern mgl
> interpreter would be appreciated, but pulling fmli may leave companies
> with unsupportable legacy systems just so they can use their current
> text based menus.
Joe, thanks for your concern. To be clear, we've not proposed to
remove FMLI at this time. We've marked it obsolete, which means that
the interface is deprecated and that we will announce its obsolescence.
We expect users to migrate to other technologies. We will need to bring
a new case to our Architectural Review Comittee (ARC) in order to
actually remove this feature.
Are you aware of applications or systems which are making use of FMLI
at this time?
After studying this facility, I concluded that:
- It does not have internationalization support, limiting its use in
many contexts.
- Its interaction model is clunky and outmoded.
- FMLI seems mostly suit to creating wrappers around command
invocations; c.f. FACE and Live Upgrade; I felt its use would be
limited or nil for such applications as database integration,
point-of-sale, etc. since it is so centered around running
UNIX commands.
- My personal observation is that most business applications are
migrating to HTTP-based technologies, or remain mainframe-connected
3270 apps. I'll admit that this is a shotgun analysis, but I did
use google extensively, and found very little evidence of active
FMLI usage.
- Versions of FMLI from other vendors may not be compatible with the
OpenSolaris version (although frankly it is hard to tell). If so,
this inhibits portability.
I'd like to hear or see concrete examples of current FMLI consumers;
that's a principle reason I posted this obsolescence notification here.
-dp
--
Daniel Price - Solaris Kernel Engineering - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - blogs.sun.com/dp
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