Could Someone Please Tell Me A Little About Borland 'Object Vision'?

[rory.starkweather.7]

I recently bought a legacy Borland C++ package, Version 4.5, on EBay, and it apparently includes Object Vision. I don't know whether to be happy or depressed,

The only descriptions I have found of Object Vision say it is a 'form based' programming language. I'm not sure what that means.

Is it something like: Object Vision has forms you can modify until they look the way you want them too, then you hang CPP code from them to give them functionality?

[SalmiSoft]

Never used it myself but I thought the whole idea of Object Vision was that there was no coding involved, so I don't think you can hang CPP code from the forms. I think it was a way of designing front ends for databases and it generated code of some sort to be run by an interpretter. You basically drew your form and visually made connections between the data and the "controls" on the form and it did the rest. Allegedly.

I do recall colleagues who used it generally liked it but said it was very slow. There was a fashion for "4GL" products at the time which combined database and coding in a single package. Object Vision was sort of like that but it could use a variety of existing databases and you drew diagrams instead of writing code. Or possibly I am thinking of a different product completely!

[jwenting]

you're wrong about Objectvision as not involving coding. There was no drag and drop system for building screens.

Objectvision was rather a unified library for creating user interfaces for DOS in an object oriented way, with implementations in C++ and Object Pascal.

You created forms and other screen elements (including the entire application) by instantiating and linking together (usually through impossibly long constructor chains) object instances.

It was a big improvement over earlier libraries however, where creating a user interface meant linking pointers together at pixel coordinates.
Object Vision did all that for you behind the scenes, you just said something like "give me a new dialog window of fixed dimensions for 10 lines of 50 characters, fill it with a new text field of 30 characters long, a label with text "hello world", a new text field of 20 characters long with a new label with text "your name", a new command button with text "submit" that calls a method doSubmit in a new instance of a class called "HandleHelloWorld", and a new command button that calls the cancel method on the dialog". And all that was a single constructor call...

I might still have the original Borland C++ 4.5 CDs and manuals somewhere, from long, long ago.

If you want more information, don't search for Object Vision however. Search for Turbo Vision, which was the name of the library as included in Borland C++ and Borland Pascal.
Object Vision was an attempt by Borland to market the library as a standalone product.

I actually once started working on writing a specialised editor for Turbo Vision, in Turbo Vision.
It was planned to be able to, through menus and dialogs, build up an entire Turbo Vision based user interface (of course there was no realtime element), generating Pascal or C++ source code which could be fed into the BC++ or BP compilers.
By the time I abandoned the idea (moving on to Windows) it could generate menu structures, main windows, and dialog boxes with most commonly used controls.
It was also over 10.000 lines of code and getting impossible to handle :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision has some information, including links to a few projects to port it to GCC.

[SalmiSoft]

Oh right, I must be confusing Object Vision with something else. Ignore my comments.

I hadn't realised that Object Vision was the same as Turbo Vision. I still have a Turbo Vision manual on my shelf, which came with my copy of Pascal back in the day. Glancing quickly through it now it doesn't look tremendously different to modern code. Maybe a bit more verbose but easily readable & understandable.

[rory.starkweather.7]

Thank you.

[jwenting]

it's not too bad, just the lines tend to get extremely long (in part because of the very long classnames.

[drianhodgson]

Although this question is marked as answered - it was answered incorrectly, entirely incorrectly!

Objectvision was a standalone application development environment for rapid application development and was actually extremely good at making stand alone models of very complex systems.

Borland sold it on the basis of A, B, C - where the A was the Application Interface which was built using tools much like those available in the early versions of powerbuilder and VB.

The B was the Business Rules which underpinned the applications - these were an entire raft of spreadsheet type @ functions with lots of power - if you ran out of power you wrote a dll and linked it to expand the power of the application.

The C - was the connectivity to back-end databases which were many and varied and even included SQL.

The run-time kit came with the application and it was FREE to distribute.

A cool tool that was allowed to simply die and with todays processing and memory it would have been great, what a shame.