The Minimum You Need to Know to be an OpenVMS Application Developer

For years now the question has been surfacing in the OpenVMS community "Where are the pimply faced kids?" The other situation which seems to continually occur is a developer of one language suddenly finding themselves having to modify or maintain an application written in a language completely foreign to them. This book was a year long effort to answer both of those questions. It also should help those to work on a good platform. Once the rudimentaries of logging in, symbols, logicals and the various editors are handled this book takes the reader on a journey of development using the most common tools encountered on the OpenVMS platform and one new tool making headway. A single sample application (a lottery tracking system) is developed using FMS and RMS indexed files in each of the covered languages. (BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL and C/C++). The reader is exposed on how to use CDD, CMS and MMS with these languages as well. A CD-ROM is included which contains the source, MMS and command files developed through the course of the book. Once RMS has been covered with all of the languages the same application using MySQL with C and FMS is covered. This breaks readers into the use of relational databases if they are not currently familiar with the concept. Rounding out the technical portion of the book is the same application using RDB with FMS. While source code is provided for all of the language implementations only FORTRAN and COBOL are actually covered in the text. It is the hope of the author that this book will prove a useful reference on the desk of every OpenVMS developer. The inclusion of MySQL should benefit both those unfamiliar with relational technology and those platform veterans interested in playing with MySQL for the first time.