From: kjelld@lmv.lm.se (Kjell Degerstedt)
Subject: Looking for beginners advice
Organization: National Land Survey of Sweden, S-801 82 Gavle, Sweden. (LMV).
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 18:10:10 GMT

At the National Landsurvey of Sweden we are planning to introduce
object oriented technics an programming languages. I am personally
leading small working group for that purpose. I have also
personally become very interested of the "new" language Eiffel
and are trying to convince my surroundings of it's advantages.

A large part of our community are working with PC:s an Mac:s.
This people are putting forvard the following questions:

- Is ther a full case envirinment in PC Eiffel ?
- Is ther a good communication protocol between a PC
  Eiffel and a Unix Eiffel environment?
- Is ther a good statistic package available in the
  PC Eiffel environment ?
- Is there any good statiscal package interfaced to Eiffel ( eg SPSS) ?
- Is there any interface between the Eiffelclass Eiffelstore and
  any of the PC DBM:s DBase II, Informix or C-isam ?
- Is there any interface between the Eiffelclass Eiffelvision and
  any PC Windows ?
- Similar questions exists for the Mac but they are not as urgent
  as the PC qestions for the time beeing.

These questions are very urgent for me and  I need a quick answer.
If there is any helpfull person out there I will be very grateful.

If you wonder who we are I leave this short description:



I'm working at the computer center of the National Landsurvey
of Sweden. We have been using computers in the map produktion
since about 1958. We have also a long tradition of developing
our own programs. In the begining we had only calcuation programs
in most of the related disciplines, like geodesy and photogrammetry.
From the middle of the 60:ies we started to use drawing machines
and developed software for that.  1973 we baught our first mini from
Prime Computer Inc. Around 1975 we developed our own sytstem for
handlig digital databases mostly for mapping purposes. We have
stored all the data for the the Swedish goverment small scale maps
in that system . The system is named Autoka. We are marketing
Autoka as a product and we have in fact sold the system to about
15 communes in Sweden. We also have one or two installations
overseas.

Autoka has been continuosly developed since the beginning and
20-30 people have been involved most of the time. 1988 we started
with a PC version which today is sold in 400 copies. In that connection
we also have developed a seamles unlimited databse for geographic
information (GI) which we call the Geodatabank system.
The system is implemented on a mini platform,
for the time being this is still a Prime
computer with the Primos operating system. A Unix version of
the system is on it's way.We have started to
build a database for an online version of the economic map
of Sweden with this system. Total size 50-70 Gb.

We are also working with GIS and were the first to buy an Arc/Info
package in Sweden. Now we have company wide Arc/Info license and many
copies runnig on the Primes but also on Sun, Decstation, PC and others.
There are around 40 people working with Arc/Info in the organisation.
We are also resellers for Arc/Info i Sweden.

Besides that we have a lot of other applications that we are planning to
move over to a object oriented language.

I hope this very short description will give you a feeling
of our activities.



- - - - - - - - - - - - BEST REGARDS,  KJELL - -  - - - - - - - - - - - -
I Kjell Degerstedt                I  Internet E-mail: kjelld@lmv.lm.se    I
I Computer Department             I     Phone office: +46 26 15 35 08     I
I National Land Survey of Sweden  I       Home phone: +46 26 14 51 84     I
I S-801 82 Gavle                  I              Fax: +46 26 65 35 69     I
I SWEDEN                          I                                       I
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel