Uniface (programming Language) - History of Uniface

History of Uniface

Originally called UNIS, the product was created in The Netherlands in 1984 by Inside Automation, a company that was headed by Bodo Douqué, with Frits Kress as Technical Director. By 1986, both the product and the company had changed their name to Uniface. (An early logo for the product included a red capital A which reflected the red capital A in the Inside Automation logo.)

Uniface was developed on the principles of the American National Standards Institute, (ANSI), 3-schema architecture. First proposed in 1975, this was a standard approach to the building of database management systems consisting of 3 schema (or metamodels):

• Conceptual schema—definition of all the data items and relationships between them. There is only one conceptual schema per database. Uniface implements the conceptual schema as the Application Model (in various Uniface versions known as the Business Object Model and the Application Object Model).
• External schema—different external (user) views of the data. There can be many external schemas for a database. Uniface implements external schemas as components. During Uniface's evolution, the External Schema became forms; hidden forms, which ran in the background without displaying to the user, became services; services split into session services for objects of the business tier and entity services that may be either business or data tier. Forms that were printed instead of being displayed became report components. The server page (USP) was introduced for web development, and later the dynamic server page was introduced to support Web 2.0 functionality.
• Internal schema—definition of the physical representation of the stored data. Uniface leaves the internal schema to the many relational database systems to which it could be connected, enabling it to be database-independent.

Uniface was developed on the DEC-VAX machine, using the native VAX file-management system RMS. A vestige of this is still seen in today’s product by its continued use of a “GOLD” key to change modes (DEC VT terminals actually had a gold or yellow key on the keyboard (Vax gold key). Today the “GOLD” is simply mapped to the numeric keyboard + key, or a function key).

Early versions of the product were bundled with the Sybase RDBMS under the name FastBuild, although it was not limited to accessing only that database.

Uniface has continuously evolved to handle new technologies and application architectures. This has been critical to its success, because applications built with Uniface can be migrated, updated and modernized without losing the original development investment.