Inside Haage and Partner

"Elate is a great and reliable foundation for our developments", says Markus. "It has continuously improved since we first saw it, and more and more features have been added that will make our programming work easier." The H&P programming team particularly appreciates the unique Virtual Processor that will be at the heart of Ami. The programmer is no longer concerned by the problem of different CPUs, because the binary program that he generates will run without modification on an incredible range of computing platforms-forty different platforms at last count. Other strong points of Ami are its fast Java Environment, and its incredibly small size.

What about programming for Ami? Is it a huge departure from working with AmigaOS? Did the programming team have a big transition to make? Markus replies that there are some new concepts, naming conventions, and calling conventions to get used to. But these are relatively minor, and it’s "quite easy" to port Amiga sources to the new system. And when difficulties are encountered, Nerding reports that Amiga’s developer support is "quite good" at responding to the problems.

The first product from Haage & Partner for the New Amiga will be StormC, a complete software development environment. StormC has been an ongoing project at Haage & Partner for the past six years, and is already widely known by Amiga programmers. Two years ago H&P decided to make the whole environment more flexible and more portable. The current version for the classic AmigaOS already shows this evolution, with several independent components communicating through a special ARexx interface. This makes the entire IDE (Integrated Development Environment) extremely flexible, permitting it to be easily extended, or partially replaced by other external components.

An example would be the incorporation of a Revision Control System (RCS), a suite of programs that tracks changes in text files and controls shared access to files in workgroup situations. Another example is the ease with which the compiler can be replaced by the GCC compiler from Tao, which outputs Virtual Processor (VP) code.

During the past two years almost all the different components of StormC have been redesigned to make them platform-independent, and also independent of the graphical user interface (GUI) system. Currently Haage & Partner is using its own set of BOOPSI extensions for this (called Storm Wizard GUI Development System). This means that the Storm IDE is ready for an easy port to a platform other than the Amiga classic. As soon as Haage & Partner receives a more mature version of Ami from Amiga, the project will be finalized.

Another product currently in preparation is StormREXX, H&P’s own version of ARexx, the powerful scripting language widely used in the classic Amiga world. The StormREXX project was born some years back for a planned AmigaOS running on a PowerPC processor. The original version of ARexx could not easily be ported, having been written in assembly language. StormREXX is compatible with the original, and is enhanced with object-oriented extensions. Use of a third-party Rexx scripting language in the New Amiga system would make it easier for developers to port their classic software and for users to port their custom scripts. And of course, there would be no need to learn another scripting language. "We are on the way to finalizing this project, so StormREXX will run on Ami very soon", says Markus.

Once the development system is completed, Haage & Partner will start to port its classic applications: the word processor Amiga Writer (which recently went to version 2.2) and the graphics processor and paint program ArtEffect (now at version 4.0). Both these products started to be reworked two years ago with future porting in mind. They are now both 100% written in C or C++, so the principal task will be changes to the GUI system. Depending on the characteristics of Ami and its tools, this task could take between three and six months for each product.

Would Haage & Partner be interested in creating completely new products for the New Amiga? Affirmative, says Markus. "There are a lot of products that we can imagine doing for the New Amiga. Most of them are related to the StormC or AmigaWriter projects. But first of all we have to take the first steps. And this also depends on what software other companies do for the new system."

We asked Markus what type of transition plans H&P has in store for WarpOS and PPC boards in regards to the New Amiga DE. "As far as we know Amiga/Tao Group have not yet decided how this can best be done,” says Nerding. “We are prepared to help with these matters by drawing on our experience with the PowerPC and AmigaOS. When Tao does a PPC-Linux version it should not be a big task to port that over to PPC Amigas as well."

Concerning legacy emulation on the New Amiga DE, Markus noted that there are several different approaches possible, one being an "abstract" emulation like UAE, which Amiga Inc. is already experimenting with. Another possibility would be to do a more native emulation under the Amiga Environment. H&P is working closely with Amiga Inc. to find the best solution to this important area.

What about upgrades to the classic Amiga OS, and how might they interact with the New Amiga? "Here too there are a lot of possibilities,” explains Nerding. “Maybe it is not that obvious to the public, but development on the Classic AmigaOS has never stopped. We are currently finalizing the second BoingBag release, which will contain more features, bug fixes and maybe some new components as well. Most of the parts that we want to see in that release have been in beta test for some time, so we think it can be released quite soon.”

More exciting developments are sure to come from Haage & Partner and other companies as the New Amiga continues to mature and build momentum. H&P has always been an innovative, successful company and a strong supporter of Amiga. It looks like they plan to bring their past successes with them into the future with the New Amiga.