Blaise NG Phase 1

Posted October 10th, 2008 by Roger Linssen

For now, it seems that releasing 4.8.1 has been a good thing. We haven't seen any showstoppers so far.
We have decided to minimize the work on Blaise 4.8, and focus on the Blaise NG project.
Of course, bugs in 4.8.1 will be fixed, but we don't want to invest in extra features in the 4.8 series.

We are planning to have phase 1 of Blaise NG ready by June 2009, which happens to be the month in which the IBUC in Riga will be held.
Phase 1 of Blaise NG will focus on three parts:

  • Layout
  • Compatibility
  • Unicode

It should be possible to take existing datamodel sources (bla, bml, bxi, bmf), load them into the Blaise NG Control Centre, and run them in the Blaise NG Data Entry Program(s), without changing anything.
The layout of result will look different, but the behaviour should be the same.

The new Control Centre will have three different editors/designers:

  • Text Editor. This is a state-of-the art editor, with features like syntax highlighting, intellisense, bracketing, etc. We have actually purchased this editor from a company called ActiPro (http://www.actiprosoftware.com/Products/DotNet/WindowsForms/SyntaxEditor...).
  • Graphical Rules Designer. This designer will let you create a Blaise datamodel in graphical way. We are still experimenting with graphical objects to create the best user experience possible. We have purchased a component library, that we can use to build this designer (http://www.ilog.com/products/diagrammernet/index.cfm).
  • Layout Designer. This designer is the replacement for the different parts in Blaise where you can define layout (Layout paragraph in the data model, Modelib Editor, Menu Editor, Internet Workshop, Datamodel Properties, ...). We want to use WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) to render layout for us. On the internet, a subset of WPF is available through Silverlight.

Because the new Control Centre is written in .NET, it has Unicode support. Unfortunately, current Blaise meta and data files don't support Unicode. Therefore, we will have to make modifications to those files to support Unicode.