It’s a few years back, and this programmer pilot fish has two things on his mind: his upcoming wedding and the thorny problem of triggering terminal screen updates in near-real-time as data changes.

“I had been working on the screen-updates problem at work for days without coming up with a decent solution,” says fish. “I really needed to handle updates without completely rewriting every screen.”

Trouble is, the changes can be triggered by actions from the corporate mainframe, or up- or downstream users, or real-time controllers on the production floor. And each screen is from an independent program with different actions that cause different data items to change in different tables and columns, which in turn impact other screens.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here