Application programming

Application programming

This topic introduces application programming in an SCO OpenServer environment. It briefly describes what application programming is and then moves on to a discussion on SCO OpenServer tools and where you can read about them, and to languages supported in the SCO OpenServer environment and where you can read about them.

Programmers working on application programs develop software for the benefit of other, nonprogramming users. Most large commercial computer applications involve a team of applications development programmers. They may be employees of the end-user organization or they may work for a software development firm. Some of the people working in this environment may be more in the project management area than working programmers.

Application programming has some of the following characteristics:

Applications are often large and are developed by a team of people who write requirements, designs, tests, and end-user documents. This implies use of a project management methodology, including version control (described in Software development tools), change requests, tracking, and so on.
Applications must be developed more robustly.
- They must be easy to use, implying character or graphical user interfaces.
- They must check all incoming data for validity (for example, using the Data Validation Tools described in Software development tools).
- They should be able to handle large amounts of data.
Applications must be easy to install and administer
(see ``Packaging your software applications'' and ``Writing a SCOadmin manager'').

SCO OpenServer tools and languages

The term ``SCO OpenServer tools'' means an existing piece of software used as a component in a new task. In a broader context, the term is used often to refer to elements of SCO OpenServer that might also be called features, utilities, programs, filters, commands, languages, functions, and so on. It gets confusing because any of the things that might be called by one or more of these names can be, and often are, used simply as components of the solution to a programming problem. The aim of this section is to give you some sense of the situations in which you use these tools, and how the tools fit together. It refers you to other parts of this topic or to other documents for more details.