Causeway has been working with the world APL community since 1994, when the company was founded on the strength of a major consultancy project with SAP AG. We specialise in developing innovative interfaces and handling complex logic, as well as marketing a variety of tools and packages to end users and other APL developers worldwide.

As well as helping SAP to develop the 'Distributed Architect' tool for their ALE work, we have helped them with several other interfaces in the configuration area and also a major module in the distribution scheduling component of APO (Advanced Planning and Optimisation). Many of the tools which we needed for this work are now incorporated into the CausewayPro Gui environment for Dyalog APL, which is the tool of choice for serious Windows application work in the APL marketplace.

We have also worked with many companies in perfecting our range of graphical and reporting tools. RainPro has been named "The industry standard in Finland", being used by several of the top Pensions companies, as well as the department of National Statistics. Many other market leaders (for example Adapta DLS with their logistics and distribution software) rely heavily on the RainPro engine to build powerful interactive graphs which allow planning users to work directly with graphical data.

As part of a recent collaboration with SoftMed Systems (the No.1 player in the US medical records industry) we have enhanced our NewLeaf reporting tool to allow systems written in APL+Win to generate PDF files directly. This is typical of the way we continually develop our products - the users are always pushing us for new features and often help us to develop and test the new components.

Where are we going next?

APL has always been a specialist market, rooted in the need to perform complex mathematics in a rapidly evolving business environment. This has in the past put a strict limit on our ability to grow, as we know exactly how big the world market is for APL tools, and we are well on the way to saturating it! However APL has at last evolved to the point where it can be used to write very effective Gui applications for desktop use, and also it can be used increasingly effectively as a COM+ object to perform a 'lights out' behind a web server. These technologies have allowed us to build GraPL and GraPL.NET which wrap the long-standing RainPro engine as a desktop product and backend server respectively.

Suddenly we have the possibility of allowing a far wider community of users access to a tried and tested graphics server. Coupled with the rapidly increasing availability of vector graphics formats (VML and SVG as well as PDF) on the internet, we are confident that we have the right software at the right time here.