What's new

This page contains recent and forthcoming additions of note to Model 204 documentation.

Model 204 Version 7.5

Version 7.5, the next release of Model 204, follows the recent acquisition of the Sirius Software product line and integrates the Sirius and Janus software products into the Model 204 nucleus. One of the more exciting results of the integration is Simple Objective User Language, or SOUL. SOUL adds object-oriented programming to, and replaces the name of, User Language. It comes with no additional cost, and it is backward compatible with existing User Language applications.

Release notes

The main features in this release of Model 204 are summarized on this page and described in greater detail in the version 7.5 release notes.

SOUL

Here are some of the new SOUL features:

• Mixed case User Language support
• Generic User Language sorting, searching, and subsetting facilities
• Improved syntax for setting/retrieving large object (LOB) values (directly to/from longstrings)
• Enhanced printing and auditing statements
• Implicit concatenation
• The Assert and Loop Next statements
• A macro language
• Data types:
  • Longstring (including image string items > 255 bytes)
  • Unicode
• Full OO programming capabilities including:
  • Class and object definitions, methods, public/private class variables, inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
  • Support for exceptions such as Try, Catch, and Throw statements
  • Support for named parameters
  • Support for method variables, that is, variables that can be used to dynamically invoke functions or subroutines
• Shorthand right-side assignment operators:
  • %a = @ + 1
  • %a = @ * 1
  • %a = @ / 1
  • %a = @ :div(1)

64-bit enablement of the Model 204 infrastructure

Model 204 moves “Above the Bar” to increase scalability, performance, and growth potential. With this release of Model 204, 64-bit addressing becomes the de-facto standard for all subsequent versions. This may bring new challenges to customers who have written assembly language functions for use within Model 204, and Rocket Software has prepared a new set of service offerings to help accommodate upgrade and conversion needs.

Physical field groups

Model 204 supports non-relational, denormalized data structures, and its efficient processing of multiply-occurring fields provides significant cost and performance benefits. This processing is enhanced by the availability of physical field groups, which let you view and process groups of fields as logical entities.

Range searching by Ordered Index (OI) chunk

The new CHUNK attribute of the DEFINE FIELD command offers significantly more efficient searching on Ordered Index numeric (ORDERED NUMERIC) field ranges. The storage for the file's values of these fields is automatically maintained, divided into ordered sub-ranges ("OI chunks") whose interval-size is part of the CHUNK definition. Finds of value ranges of these fields search by OI chunk rather than by individual value, so they entail fewer scans of the Ordered Index entries.

Expanded file-record limit

In version 7.5 of Model 204, the record limit per file increases from sixteen million records to forty-eight million records.

New debugging tools

Developing web and screen applications that use Model 204 is made easier by newly acquired debuggers: Janus Debugger, TN3270 Debugger, and SoftSpy.

The status of Janus SOAP

Janus SOAP was an important product in the Sirius Software product set and is still referenced frequently in the M204wiki pages. Significantly, Janus SOAP included the Janus SOAP User Language Interface, also known as the Janus SOAP ULI. The Janus SOAP ULI was a collection of extensions to User Language originally intended to simplify the coding of applications that used the Janus SOAP product. In version 7.5 of Model 204, the Janus SOAP ULI features were incorporated into Model 204. They are the new SOUL features highlighted above. Janus SOAP continues as a separate product providing support for XML processing.

Note: The Janus SOAP ULI extensions did not alter the behavior of User Language. This is important on two counts:

1. When the extensions formerly known as the Janus SOAP ULI are used, SOUL applications continue to work as they always have.
2. All documentation concerning SOUL/User Language remains valid.