Vivtek vaporware

Vivtek Vaporware

As noted elsewhere, Vivtek is at the present time primarily a service company. We're working to diversify. Here are some of the hugely ridiculously major projects we dream about. If even one of these is ever implemented, you'll be reading about us in Wired. At the moment, however, we are content to be one of the leading players in the vaporware industry.

PROGRAMMING PRODUCTS AND LITERATE PROGRAMMING

Ah, literate programming. This is something we dream about a lot. We have finally completed a topic page on literate programming, so now our way is clear to implement one of these tools. Ha! We envision two basic tools for literate programming: the VVLP (Vivtek Literate Programmer) and the DLP (Distributed Literate Programmer).

The VVLP is a Windows-based, OLE-compliant literate programming tool. By literate programming, we are envisioning something a little more ambitious (this is the vaporware page, after all) than Knuth's original concept. We want full pattern-oriented template-based processing, along with a lot of stuff which will make it easy to write custom, specialized code generators which work with arbitrary data to write programs. Cool, huh? Well, don't hold your breath.

At any rate, OLE compliance means that you'll be able to use Word for your typesetting and documentation and then edit code right in the documentation using a real code editor. And have access to all the other goodies from the same editor, too.

So what's DLP? DLP focusses more on the group effort and will very likely interface with VVLP in some way. This is vague because, well, it's vaporware. DLP will provide tools for groups working together (or not very together) to do things in a literate way. It's aimed at open software kinds of groups.

The DLP will also provide a Web interface to allow interactive browsing and annotation of projects, including a bulletin-board format for group interaction, change request tracking, and so forth. It'll allow you to update code by mailing it to an autoresponder. It's gonna be good. As soon as it makes that crucial transition from vaporware to software, that is.

ONTOLOGY TOOLS AND ONTOLOGIES

We've been captivated of late with ontologies or knowledge tools. An ontology is a set of logical statements which define (or at least interrelate) concepts in a given area. It works with a lexicon to actually connect those concepts to words and phrases. So there are two things we want to do. First, we'd like to come up with an ontological extension to the normal database paradigm. And then we'd like to formalize our topic pages into an industry ontology. It seems to us that such an ontology would not only be a useful way to navigate a website, but also could lead to formal ways to specify program components, even for the technically naive. And that would be a neat service.

Anyway, we even have some formal vaporware in this area: the Vivtek Industry Survey. Want to see it? Send mail or money, that's the best.

This page reads even better in Cockney dialect.