This year's International Spectrum Conference, held in beautiful Anaheim, California was the official launching point for a gem of a product that could easily turn into a diamond mine. Visual World, the name of the company and the product, attracted a constant crowd throughout the show. Visual World could easily prove to be the most exciting concept that the business-solution industry could have ever hoped for.

The company was formed and is headed by Dan Kelley, a longtime Pick-aware developer. It includes such heavyweights as Dave and Paul Ostby, the authors of Revelation. Since 1972, Dan and crew have been solving business problems using Pick-based solutions. He boasts that he bought his first Microdata system before Microdata even met Dick Pick. They know how to solve problems. Sound familiar?

Visual World, the product, presents a new paradigm for solving business problems. The paradigm is full of new vocabulary such as Attraction Rules, Visual Business Objects (VBO's), Collaborative Business Modeling, and Visual Business Re-Engineering, to name just a few. They summarize the product with the tagline "Enterprise-Wide Virtual Business Environment".

While there are loads of new concepts and capabilities, there are also some new spins on old friends as well, including:

• Flex BASIC. Conveniently similar to Pick/BASIC, but with lots of added features.
• "Flex" arrays, the replacement for "dynamic arrays". These are arrays that are extended beyond the "three" dimensions familiar to Pick(-like) coders to an infinite number of dimensions, using a run-time length-encoding scheme that permits an almost infinite recursive nesting of arrays within arrays. Any of these Flex arrays can contain any kind of Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) (really), such as sounds, images, video or documents.
• Dictionaries. They still look like dictionaries, but now additionally carry the properties (behaviors) that act upon objects in the database. They look a lot like correlatives and processing codes to us.

This is real object-oriented systems, from the basement up. Virtual World relies heavily on two classes of objects, Basic Place Objects and Basic Business Objects.

The 5 Basic Place Objects:

1. CITY - where all buildings live (Electronic Commerce)
2. BUILDING - where your company lives
3. DEPARTMENT - where Desks and Offices live
4. OFFICE - where you put your desk
5. DESK - where you put your Trays, Reports, Cards, and other VBO's

The 7 Basic Business Objects:

1. Form Objects are used to track work through a business process. Forms can be sales orders, purchase orders, service orders, loan applications, etc. Each instance of work is tracked by a Form.
2. Tray Objects are used to manage work flow. Forms moved from Tray to Tray based on attraction rules you define. For example, "If Order is ready to ship then attract it to READY TO SHIP Tray."
3. Card Objects are used to store persistent information. If you have DBMS Systems, these files will usually translate directly into Cards. Examples of Cards are: Customer Card, Vendor Card, Product Card, etc. (We find this metaphor particularly humorous in light of the late Dick Pick's often-stated goal of exorsizing the ghost of Herman Hollerith - the inventor of the punch card - from every computer in the world.)
4. Calendar Objects, like Tray Objects, attract Forms with business rules, but with the added component of date. For example, Order Forms may be attracted to the Shipments Calendar using Date Shipped as the target date on the Calendar.
5. Report Objects are used to create reports from Trays, Calendars, and other objects making it easy to report on work in any state.
6. Journal Objects are used to create journal entries for accounting. As Forms pass through a work flow, Journals can be automatically updated, providing a full audit trail.
7. VAP (Value Added Processes) Objects are used to perform tasks. For example, you could create a VAP to monitor all orders coming into the "Credit to Check Tray" then call an "artificial intelligence" program to check the credit of each order as they arrive. VAP's allow you to create an asynchronous cooperative work flow environment running your entire company.

We held a Virtual World seminar at JES & Associates offices in Newport Beach, California, the weekend before the Spectrum show and invited a cross-section of industry heavyweights, developers, marketers, and even some actual end-users. Without exception, everyone in attendance was completely blown away. One of the participants observed that he is constantly approached by "Pick" clients who ask "Where should we go next?". His response: "I used to tell them to just stay where they are. Now, I think I'll revise that opinion in light of Virtual World."

One aspect of this hot new product that particularly appeals to us is its potential integration with the Internet. Visual World uses TCP/IP, the underlying protocol of the Internet, as its mechanism for sending messages between processes and events. This means that Visual World will be immediately 'net-aware, allowing worldwide deployment of applications. This could easily lead to a few more Place Objects, such as country and continent.

Put this one on your must-see list. Contact Visual World for more information at 415-461-6696, Fax: 415-461-6690, or their Web site at www.visualworld.com.

See you next issue.

Jon Sisk
www.jes.com

Original article for Computing News & Review, March, 1996

Copyright © 1996 Jonathan E. Sisk.