A Java Windowing Toolkit for Text Terminals

Craig O'Shannessy has developed a Charva-based application for UndercoverWear that runs on ruggedized mobile computers mounted on forklift trucks. Each mobile computer has an 8-row by 40-column screen and a pass-thru printer, and Telnets using a radio link into a Linux box. The back-end is an EJB-based application running on jBoss. Here's a recent message from Craig:

"I've been using Charva commercially for about 2 years, with no problems at all. I'm only using it on about 7 terminals, but they are going hell for leather (vehicle RF terminals mounted on trolleys with scanners and printers), all together all day."

Adrian Papari used Charva in his GILoT project (Generic Interpretative Log Tail).

"First I would like to thank you for all the work you must have put into Charva. It really is a nice idea, implemented very well.... I am using Charva to provide a text-mode administrative interface for our product which is a Linux-based server.... I decided I would use gcj (the GNU compiler for Java) to create a native executable. The speed it runs at now is very impressive, you wouldn't know it was written in Java!" (Nick Liebmann)

"Our business unit CPP within the SteelCompany Corus in Ijmuiden (Holland) uses your Charva application now for 6 months with success and I want to thank you for all the blood sweat and tears that you have put into the application. We are using your application as a user-interface for our mobile terminals in cranes and trucks and the application - which runs under AIX - proved itself as fast, stable and maintainable." (Leon van Rooijen)

"I have been using charva for the past one year and it has turned out to be the most ideal solution for my project which has an expansive module that deals with handheld terminals. The TUI for handhelds was done using charva with least of changes made to the actual charva framework. The product has gone live in two customer sites and the performance so far has been extremely good. I would like to thank you for the support during this period. I would be happy to serve as a reference to anyone who has doubts on the usability or dependability of charva."

Thanks once again
Deepu Thomas

"This communication is to let you know that for our specific purposes, CHARVA has proven to be extremely suitable. It is working well and the system using it will be going into production shortly.

Over a number of years, Fujitsu in Australia (www.fujitsu.com.au) has developed and maintained a Train Management System for Pacific National Limited (www.pacificnational.com.au). The Train Management System is supported by Fujitsu's office in Adelaide South Australia (contact 61 8 8305 8500) and manages Pacific National's locomotive, wagon, freight and container movements around Australia.

Pacific National is the largest private rail freight operator in Australia with annual operating revenue of more than $1 billion dollars (AUD). Pacific National operates nationally and has around 3100 staff, 1000 locomotives, 10200 wagons, and 85 sites.

Recently Pacific National requested that Fujitsu add a Container Handling Module to track container movements for containers in Pacific National's possession. A component of that module is used by crane and forklift operators (placing containers on trucks, wagons, etc) who have wireless networked computer systems in their cabins.

These systems (486's running DOS 6.22) connect to a central server and run a "CHARVA" based application which interfaces to the main system giving the operators interactive communications, work orders, status updates, etc.

The actual "charva" application system is quite complex and has real time screen updates via event callbacks and other advanced java usage. The 486 systems in the cabins have a screen display of only 40 characters wide by 8 lines so we have had quite a challenge getting things to fit (we had to remove all line drawing capabilities, etc to save screen space).

Thank you for providing such an excellent package.

Yours sincerely,

I found your library VERY useful and well-written; in my application (Faktotum3, a Cocoon-based application for invoice management) it is the framework for my setup procedure. Thanks a lot!

I tried your library on Solaris 9 SPARC, Solaris 10 x86, Linux x86 and Mac OS X Panther: it worked well, but for Mac OS X Panther I had to give the "-Djava.library.path" switch to the JVM.