Introduction

The Xobas 4GL interpreter and user interface version 1.0.7 have been ported to the Cygwin 1.5 environment. This provides a solution for either mixed MS-Windows and GNU/Linux desktop environments or creates a migration path from the MS-Windows to the GNU/Linux desktop. To be able to run a 4GL application, you need to contact a remote Repository, Validate and Data service. A standalone version of Xobas-4GL on MS-Windows is not available. It is however technically possible to achieve this by porting all the Xobas projects to this environment.

This document describes the steps to perform to install Xobas-4GL binary archive packages in a Cygwin environment and is intended for the following product releases:

To setup a cygwin environment on your MS-Windows computer you can run setup.exe. Make sure that you include the xorg-x11-base from the X11 category. To start an X window after installation, simply type c:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat from a command prompt. (assuming you used the default installation directory on the c-drive.) For all cygwin specific issues, please consult their pages at http://cygwin.com and http://x.cygwin.com.

Prerequisites

Xobas products are built around numerous open source packages. All of these packages like libxml2 or libglade are part of the Cygwin distribution. Double check if all the dependent packages are available. For details on the dependencies, check the project pages or the cygwin specific readme of the various Xobas packages listed next their names below.

Installation

The installation is very straight forward. Download and install the packages in this order:

  1. xobas-calc-1.0.4-1.tar.bz2
  2. xobas-soap-1.0.6-1.tar.bz2
  3. xobas-run-1.0.7-1.tar.bz2

Logon to the Cygwin environment and go to the root (/) directory. Type in the following commands to extract to archives and to put all the binaries and libraries in place:

# cd /
# tar xvjf /tmp/xobas-calc-1.0.4-1.tar.bz2
# tar xvjf /tmp/xobas-soap-1.0.6-1.tar.bz2
# tar xvjf /tmp/xobas-run-1.0.7-1.tar.bz2

In the previous example, the assumption is that you downloaded the archives to the directory /tmp. If you downloaded into a different directory, replace /tmp with the directory you use.

That is all. Now you can test if it works by typing in:

$ xobas4gl

If you want to start it from a MS-Windows command shell window rather than a Cygwin command window, include the path and call the program directly:

C:\Cygwin\bin\xobasrun.exe

In both cases, your (Cygwin) X server must be up and running.

If all went well, you will see the Xobas Web Services logon screen where you can enter the various hostnames and/or IP addresses of your Xobas Repository, Validate and Data Web Service. To change the defaults of these values, edit file /etc/xobasruncfg.xml (or C:\Cygwin\etc\xobasruncfg.xml if you access it from a non-Cygwin command shell.)