Purpose of the SCOadmin environment

The SCOadmin environment was designed to meet these goals:

• Enable the development of easy-to-use system management tools. UNIX systems have traditionally confronted the new system administrator with unfriendly administration tools and a steep learning curve. The SCOadmin environment overcomes these obstacles by providing the capability to design task-oriented management applications with consistent and intuitive interfaces. SCO Visual Tcl provides a basic set of user interface elements (also called controls) which are similar in appearance for both graphical and character environments, and SCOadmin enhances SCO Visual Tcl functionality with many controls of its own, including status and tool bars.

  To ensure the variety of user elements are used consistently (and in accordance with interfaces used elsewhere), a set of guidelines is provided for developers in ``User interface style conventions''

• Make application development easier. SCO Visual Tcl also makes it possible for both the Motif and character-based user interfaces to be created with the same Tcl program. Writing a SCO Visual Tcl program takes much less effort than required to create either interface in C with Motif or curses library calls. Because Tcl is an interpreted language, changes can be made and tested immediately without recompiling. In addition, the SCOadmin Tcl extensions can be accessed from Tcl without a development system.

  The SCOadmin environment provides easy-to-use facilities in other areas, by providing easier internationalization of messages and a system of error handling that provides improved handling and reporting of errors.

• Provide an object-oriented framework that functions in a networked environment. UNIX resources (such as printers or filesystems) are traditionally managed with widely diverse interfaces (printers administered with lpadmin, filesystems with mount/umount, and so on). The SCOadmin framework allows developers to isolate the unruly nature of these commands by defining object interfaces that access resources with a common set of functions, regardles of whether they are on the local system or a remote system.

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  NOTE: SCOadmin managers are not required to use the networked object facilities of the administration framework. There are many SCOadmin managers, such as the system startup and shutdown managers, which operate only on the local system and perform their tasks by calling the necessary UNIX commands directly. Developers need to weigh the effort needed to define objects and their service routines against the capabilities gained by doing so. If a particular system entity will be used by many SCOadmin managers, it makes sense to create an object definition to reduce duplication of effort.

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