Insite Application Enhancer

InSite is a plug-in for ZTERM 2000 that supports Windows enhancements to host based applications. It uses the same escape sequences as Alpha Micro's inSight/am(tm) plug in which is supported by AlphaLAN. Because both AlphaLAN and inSight/am from Alpha Micro use old 16-bit Windows technology, ZTERM 2000 cannot use Alpha Micro's inSight/am or any additions written for it.

Although ZTERM 2000 is written in the C programming language, the InSite plug-in is written in BASIC and the source code is provided. The dialect of BASIC is PowerBASIC (on the web - http://www.powerbasic.com). Although PowerBASIC isn't as easy to write code with as Visual Basic, PowerBASIC compiles directly to a DLL and therefore can be distributed with ZTERM 2000 without having to include megabytes of runtime components. It's also much faster than Visual Basic as it compiles directly to machine code, like a C compiler.

Take a look at the 'insite32.bas' file in the folder where ZTERM 2000 was installed. The source is quite well commented and should provide ample indication as to what's going on. In the future builds of ZTERM 2000 we'll have this plug-in more complete and documented better.

Although you can obviously modify insite32.bas, we'd recommend looking at example.bas (PowerBASIC) and example.ab.bas (AlphaBASIC) to see how other DLLs can be called from InSite. You can also write DLLs that can be called from the host in C. However, because ZTERM 2000 is a 32-bit application, any existing 16-bit DLLs written for AlphaLAN and inSight/AM will have to ported to Win32.

The other thing to look at is 'insite32.rc'. This is a standard Windows resource file that's generated by Microsoft Developer Studio. This file contains the dialog prototypes that make up all the dialogs displayed by InSite. In the next build, the process of generating one of these files will be added to the help file.

If you do read the source files, please drop us a line (rod@coolstf.com) to let us know if you're planning on taking advantage of InSite.