Working With X6 review

Richard Bittleston worked as a principal research scientist in the Computer Systems Lab at the GEC Research Group where he specialised in networking, compiler design, database technologies and artificial intelligence. While there, he helped to pioneer LAN solutions, getting a fully operational Ethernet in place just three months after Xerox published its original papers.

As a result, Bittleston was experimenting with data management across networks long before it was common practice. His work in collaboration with the computer science teams at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities saw the prototyping of several data synchronisation models, and the principle of differencing (a technique to determine the minimum information required to synchronise) was developed along with detailed studies into dynamic languages that can generate their own code and infer rules.

Eventually going freelance in 1990 to evolve his experience and the tools he'd developed along the way into X6, he was joined by Anton Leach in 1996 to bring some real-world experiences to the table. Leach, a former technical director of EMAP Online, was a specialist in web server CGI design and helped to sharpen the X6 environment.

Technically speaking, X6 is an interpreted scripting language written in ANSI C and operating on both Windows and Linux computers. Borrowing much from both Lisp and XML, adding a powerful database, TCP communications and indexing functions, this small program is very efficient and totally non-visual. Running in either a Windows Command Prompt or a Unix shell session, it's perfect for all data-manipulation tasks. Programs are saved as plain text and run by the X6 interpreter, enabling the same code to be used on both Win32 and Unix computers, while an X6 library allows code to be compiled to Visual C++ and MFC apps as a database and communications engine.

This book is, if you hadn't guessed, about managing information with X6. Actually, that's far too simplistic a description; in fact, the book is just part of the package. Buy it and you also get a CD containing a complete set of tools and resources including an X6 editor/development kit, compiler/cli, web server and a complete help library with the full X6 reference manual and tutorial information not included in the book itself. It's as comprehensive as it is simple to use, a set of tools addressing a vast array of problems from data management itself to format conversion, synchronisation and communications.

Author: Davey Winder