Hi from Edmund

Hi, my name is Edmund Reinhardt and I live with my wife and four kids in two wooded acres on the Niagara Escarpment.

Unlike some of my co-workers, my history does not go back as far as hardware design, but my grade 10 data processing course did use punch cards.

While at the University of Toronto, I hung out at the Human Computer Interface and Graphics Lab. I will concede that one motivation was the better hardware. In the beginning this consisted of 80 line terminals versus the regular 40 line ones, but by 1987 this included Sun workstations. But another part of my motivation was that I am interested in human beings as well as computers . The interface between computers and humans seems to be where the interesting problems are (as well as the cool graphics). At university I spent time browsing the internet which in those days consisted mainly of ftp. Someone was compiling a document listing all of the services available on the internet and I remembered painstakingly printing out the pages of information and putting them into a binder. We sure have come a long way since those days :-)

I started with IBM in June 1989 and I have been working on one form or other of DDS tooling ever since. I started with SDA on the green screen and then went on to DSU on OS/2. I ported that to the 32-bit OS/2 API and then led a team to rewrite it for Windows. That is how CODE Designer for CODE/400 came about. I worked on WebFacing from almost the beginning. I led a small team in writing the initial middle tier runtime as well as the conversion from DDS to JSF.
I then wrote then DDS object model in Java that is used for WebFacing conversion as well as for the outline view for the JLpex editor. In version 7 this same DDS DOM is used to enable the Screen Designer Technology Preview.

I intend to write posts about WebFacing, DDS tooling in WDSc, the Screen Designer and tips for effective use of the Eclipse platform.

Outside of work I am a lay pastor at a small Anabaptist church and am involved in various ministries. I didn’t realize that Brian Farn was a fellow clarinetist. I guess it just goes to show how useful blogs are for bringing out the truth and connecting people. I look forward to doing a lot more of that in the coming posts.

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