CREATING A NUCLEUS APPLICATION
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CREATING A NUCLEUS APPLICATION

Creating A Nucleus Application, Almost From Scratch

2006-03

Harvey Rodstein, the chief architect 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 tool-set.

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 discovered 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.

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, 989, 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.

Next page: Splash Screens and Menus

Article Table of Contents:

  1. Creating a Nucleus Application: NHI
  2. Splash Screens
  3. Inventory List View
  4. List View Populated
  5. Detail View
  6. Detail Resale
  7. Edit Location
  8. Edit Policy and Claims
  9. Edit Category
  10. Edit Subcategory (Suggested Items)
  11. Enter Receipts and Records
  12. Inventory Value Summary Report
  13. NHI Summary