Notia

At my early time in Notia (in 1993 if my memory is correct), I has participated in a project, that develop a ERP package that includes General Ledges, Account Payable, Account Receivable, Warehouse Inventory modules. The technology used that time was Novell B*trieve as database engine, C++ and for business logic, Borland Turbo Vision for C++ for GUI. At that time, Tran Duc Trung was leader, based on university compiler's knowledge, he developed a kind of Domain Specific Language, that allow end-users or implementors define posting rules using that DSL. The "posting rules" DSL is comprehensive featuring expression, AND, OR boolean condition, with Account, Money concept. Other team member, Martin Smid went so far and defined other DSL for reporting function. we called it FRT. Until now, I have not seen better reporting tool with such flexibility, elegance, and easy to used. Other other side, we also faced a lot problems. One of them is that MS*DOS can not run program with more than 1MB static data segment. C++ is also not good choice for GUI development, we encountered a lot of errors related to allocation/free memory, using pointer. And one of most ironical is in using of the DSL itself. The software developers didn't understand well accounting to be honest we was not willing to learn it on the other hand implementors and customers was not matured enough in using the DSL in effective manner. Despite these facts, Notia was able to sold the software and implement it in hundreds customers including few big names as ABB.