Creating A Nucleus Application, Almost From Scratch

by Jonathan E. Sisk

This article is now on NuWiki.com!

Harvey Rodstein, the chief inventor and co-founder of BinaryStar, recently sat down with me on a Monday morning to train me how to use Nucleus, his Rapid Application Development toolset.

Our goal was to build a fully functional application. We decided that rather than recreating yet another name and address database, we would instead duplicate the functionality of a personal home inventory program I discoved by accident one day in my Quicken directory.

That program was "Quicken Home Inventory" (QHI). It is a very compact, yet surprisingly thorough inventory database for your household stuff, down to submitting insurance claims.

We decided that it would be fun to have an application like this in a Nelson database and set out to recreate its functionality under Nucleus. (More on Don Nelson).

By Friday morning we were done. Voila! Nucleus Home Inventory (NHI) was born! And it's triplets!

You see, QHI is like any other Windows application in that it can run anywhere, as long as it's in Windows (so up to one place, for those keeping score).

NHI runs on green-screen, thin-client, and as a Windows application, like QHI. So you get three for the price of one. Plus it's inherently multi-user.

Harvey and I pretty much nailed it in the first pass. The functionality was duplicated (okay, 98%), the reports were in place, and short of having the documentation done (naturally), it was ready to share with any Nucleus user.

Nucleus Home Inventory (NHI) will soon be available as a free download on the Binary Star site. Feel free to use it, take it apart to see what we did, and even enhance it if you like.

The following pages document the journey.

 Create your own business wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS