Uniface and GitHub-Getting Started

(Original creator: thomas.shore)

We hope you have had a chance to browse around the Uniface samples on GitHub. This blog post will give you some background information and some useful tips for getting started.

Objectives of Using GitHub:

Provide an open public globally accessible area for Uniface code samples and examples
Theme focused
Encourage participation in Uniface projects
Ease configuration and setup of Uniface and Uniface examples

Globally Accessible

We are using GitHub.com to host our publically available repositories. In using GitHub.com as the code hosting platform you have the opportunity to work with project authors and on your own projects from anywhere. The GitHub platform is widely adopted, very well understood including many samples and guides (https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/) and has a variety of tooling on various platforms to interface with the repositories.

How to get to the Repositories

You can obtain access to the projects by navigating to the GitHub Uniface page https://github.com/uniface and select a Repository. In this example I chose the Project-Startup repository. Once selected the following page will appear:

Uniface GitHub

Click on: GitHub2

If you choose ‘Open in Desktop’ it will attempt to use ‘GitHub Desktop’ available here :

https://desktop.github.com/. Alternatively, you can just select ‘Download ZIP’ to download an archive of the project, extract and use as a sample.

Theme Focused

We have created a series of Repositories that include:

Project Startup	Basic project structure with support for the Project Setup Tool.
Development Tooling	Tooling to support development with Uniface including: Uniface Meta Tools Project Setup Tool Signature Wizard Version Control setup
User Interface	User interface implementations: Outlook UI Uniface Tunes (uTunes) Manipulating Windows specific functionality
Integration	Uniface Integrations: Utilizing 3GL in Uniface Implementing a REST Api Calling REST Dropbox Sharing data across Windows Applications Interfacing with a GeoIPDB
Mobile	The Uniface uClaim application
Product Usage	Detailed usage of: Structs Using POSTMESSAGE across your applications
Web	Uniface web basics: Charting Promises Security Basic web framework

Encourage Participation

In utilizing GitHub you have the opportunity to FORK( https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/) the project or projects and add their functionality or techniques to your own project. Additionally, you can request that your additions/changes be incorporated into the master. There is no guarantee that your changes will be accepted, just like every other open-source initiative.

Simple setup and execution

Those Uniface projects that require some basic setup utilize the Project Setup Tool to configure the application for your environment, importing sources, creating shortcuts and compiling the application.

Conclusion

While no attempt is made to provide detailed instructions for using Git and GitHub there are numerous sites that provide instructions and tooling on how to use Git and GitHub. Please take advantage of those resources. As this is the beginning of this initiative please feel free to comment and make suggestions.

Blog