ESL Syndetic - serving to unite and connect

ESL is a visual development tool for building workstation applications that can interact with mainframes, servers and databases using a wide variety of protocols. ESL is used worldwide in high-performance, production, mission-critical, client/server applications.

The visual tools support a rapid application development model while the underlying ESL language provides the benefits of scalability and maintainability.

ESL is well suited to large organizations that need to build complex mission-critical, multi-layered applications. ESL provides:

GUI tools for designing & building the user interface
Efficient access to enterprise wide databases
Robust, optimised, integration of PCs, hosts, servers and networks
Application partitioning between client and server
Adaptive architecture based on the requirements of your application
Seamless access to popular desktop applications
Integration of new or existing C, C++ and COBOL code
Easy transition from procedural programming environments
Desktop integration of current and legacy systems

Platform Support

ESL is currently available on Windows and has been tested on platforms up to and including Windows/Vista.

The Presentation Manager version of ESL is still available and is supported on OS/2 warp 4.0.

Connectivity Options

ESL supports a wide range of connectivity options - as shown in the following schematic.

Database support is available for:

DB2 UDB
Oracle
Sybase
SQL Server

In addition to providing support for direct operating system calls, ESL provides high-level interfaces for;

APPC
CICS
DDE
DLLs
FTP upload and download
EHLLAPI (Rumba, PComm & Attachmate)
HTTP (including URL encoding and decoding)
ODBC

We have interfaces in beta release for MQ and MAPI.

ESL for Windows is a set of native Windows development tools for the powerful ESL language. The language enables both statically and dynamically defined screen objects to provide the ultimate in User Interface flexibility. With the ability to externalise strings, it is possible to develop a truly multinational application.

ESL QuikStep

As both an ESL source code project manager and an interactive source-level debugger, ESL QuikStep provides you with a robust, flexible visual testing environment for your ESL for Windows applications.

ESL Layout Editor

The ESL Layout Editor for Windows enables developers to construct the graphical interface of an application. Developers can create and modify the full range of ESL and dialog objects.

ESL DB/Assist

ESL DB/Assist is a graphical tool for generating the SQL portion of an application. You can create and edit SQL statements, execute and view the results of SQL operations, and generate ESL language code for integration into ESL applications. The benefits of ESL DB/Assist include:

Support for DB2 UDB, which includes support for static SQL, permitting pre-compilation of multiple SQL operations for high-performance online transaction processing (OLTP). In addition, dynamic SQL support provides flexibility for developing executive information systems and decision support systems
Access to all SAA DRDA databases via DB2 Connect
The ability to group SQL statements into access modules that can be shared across the enterprise

ESL SQL Wizard

Create and test SQL statements in a point-and-click environment and then generate source code fragments to include within your application, or complete applications, which will be able to:

Display
Insert
Update
Delete

data from any of the supported database systems.

The ESL Language

At the core of ESL technology is the high-level ESL language, rich in programming constructs for developing graphics, communications and database access routines. The ESL language is:

Nonprocedural:
Event-driven:
Object-based:

Comprehensive documentation is available online, in help format and in PDF format. We still have some traditional style Programmers Reference cards available on request.