Controlling Your Network
Symbiotics' new Network Control, one of many software testing metrics, makes it easy for users and developers to interact by dynamically sharing data between applications running on the LAN.
PC Week Labs evaluated Network Control. Networks Developer is a development system, based mostly on C programming, that lets programmers develop applications that establish connections between workstations on a network and exchange data using the TCP/IP protocol. Networks Connect is an application created with Networks Developer that allows Microsoft Windows applications running on different systems on a network to exchange data using the clipboard and Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). T he programs were configured with an included program, Network Control.
Network Control, offers the potential for special-purpose development efforts under Windows and other platforms. Network Control is also available for DOS, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s SunOS and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Unix variant HP/UX.
PC Week Labs easily set up DDE links between workstations on the Network Control. A spreadsheet created using Microsoft Corp.'s Excel version on one PC was linked to a Microsoft Word for Windows document on another system. As PC Week Labs made changes to the spreadsheet, the modifications were dynamically updated in the linked word-processing document. PC Week Labs then was able to set up multiple machines operating simultaneous DDE links to a single server. Using the DDE links, connections to Unix boxes can share data from Unix databases on Windows systems. Any Windows program with DDE access in its macro language can be made a network application with Network Control. Because Network Control uses TCP/IP for transport, homogeneity is established among Windows, DOS and Unix systems. The downside of this in PC Week Labs tests was that the TCP/IP stack consumed approximately 75K bytes of RAM. When running Windows, this is not a severe problem, but DOS applications running under Windows lose much precious RAM. Communication between workstations in Network Control is performed via agents, or processes that encompass both the client and server ends of the communication. PC Week Labs modified an example agent to send two numbers to another system. On the other system, the first number was converted to the base of the second number, and the converted number was returned. Setting up Network Control was not trivial. For each system tested, PC Week Labs had to specify the network adapter and in many cases its configuration parameters. In some cases it took manual tuning of the CONFIG.SYS file to install the product properly.
Network Testing Software
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