AT&T Software Solutions Division announced the availability of the latest release of David Korn's enhanced shell program for UNIX—POSIX Korn Shell (PKSH), informally called KSH-93 during the early stages of development. PKSH includes many new features and has been designed to comply with the POSIX shell standard. At the same time, PKSH has been enhanced to boost programmer productivity through improved performance and support for re-use and extensions. New features and program improvements include new commands, additional variables, support of associative as well as indexed arrays, and support for compound data objects and discipline functions.

PKSH is available for Linux for $149 for a binary license for one system. Please contact Ed Cartier, AT&T Licensing, (908)580-5719, ecartier@attmail.att.com

Applied Information Systems has released its XESS 3.0 spreadsheet product for Linux. XESS is an X Windows product that provides a full complement of spreadsheet functions and graphs, plus many advanced features. It includes a platform-independent API for developing client/server applications that share data in real-time with spreadsheets. A Tcl interface is also available.

XESS is supported on Linux and most Unix and OpenVMS systems. Demonstration versions are available by ftp at ftp.uu.net in the directory /vendor/ais. AIS may be reached at 100 Europa Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27514; 1-919-942-7801; fax 1-919-493-7563; e-mail info@ais.com.

Softfocus formally announced the release of a Linux version of their popular BTree/ISAM file manager. BTree/ISAM is a complete random and sequential file management library written entirely in portable C. Available since 1982, it is currently in use worldwide on a wide range of operating systems and compilers. The distribution includes complete source code, excellent documentation, and technical support through email, phone, fax, and BBS.

“Actually, we've been actively supporting Linux for over a year now,” says Jon Simkins, president of Softfocus, “We take pride in the portability of our software to all robust C platforms and Linux certainly qualifies there. But interest in Linux as a serious development platform has increased dramatically over the last several months and we thought we'd better let the world know that BTree/ISAM v3.1 is Linux compatible.” Simkins added that the low cost and high performance of BTree/ISAM make it very popular with Linux developers.

Simkins is effusive in his praise for Linux. “I first installed Linux last year after one of my clients recommended it. I was immediately surprised by how robust and complete a system this was. Linux is now my principle development system and it's no exaggeration to say I'd be lost without it. The quality of the C development tools made the BTree/ISAM port trivial.”

Softfocus may be contacted at: Softfocus, 1343 Stanbury Rd., Oakville, Ontario CANADA L6L 2J5

For product information, e-mail info@softfocus.com or contact Softfocus at (905)825-0903 (voice) or (905)825-1025 (fax).