The prime objective of CausewayPro was to provide APL with a GUI development environment which could compete effectively with "real" GUI builders like visual Studio and Delphi. It lets you build good-looking windows applications quickly, and modify and enhance existing dialogues with the minimum of fuss. It really can be used to build a large and complex application which is indistinguishable from the kind of thing the 'professionals' take man-years to assemble - if you want to see a typical CPro-engineered product in action grab a demo copy of GraPL from www.grapl.com and try it out!

CausewayPro takes great care to separate the GUI elements from the application logic. Everything to do with the GUI is held as data in a dialogue-box definition and there is no need to learn any of the Windows jargon in order to make a very effective application. In the future, you will find that you can move the Gui to a new platform (for example the WinForms library that comes with Microsoft's .NET offering) with almost no pain at all.

Finding out more

The best way to explore CausewayPro is to read the first few pages of the on-line tutorial. If you have the APL2741 font loaded, you can start from here to read the tutorial. This version uses a 2-frame layout - if you don't like frames, try this instead. Go to the "Free Stuff" section of the site to get the APL2741 font which you will need it you want to read the APL code.

As you work through the tutorial, you should keep looking back and thinking “How would I have done this without Causeway” and you will begin to add up the hours and days it can save you. When you finish a piece of work, look back on it and rate it for good looks, ease of use, and reliability. Of course it will not go quite as fast as the same application coded from the ground up in Dyalog, but if your users want something now, something that looks right, something that works and keeps on working, then Causeway is for you.