The PinK Basics

PinK is a TCL/TK extension providing an interface to the ADAMO and DAD packages. ADAMO implements the Entity Relationship Database Model and DAD extends it towards a distributed multiprocess database with fast and flexible IO. PinK is designed to serve as an easy to use interface incorporating both the DAD- and ADAMO features. The tk tollkit and other graphical extensions (like BLT) provide graphics widgets enabeling the PinK programmer to make GUI's to the database in an easy way.
The implementation of the ADAMO- and DAD-features is object oriented and hence a very intuitive approach to the database. Nevertheless to be able to understand PinK, basic knowledge of the ADAMO and DAD concepts is a prerequisit. PinK tries to stay as close as possible to ADAMO and DAD, making it easy to design applications for users being familiar with these conceps.

There are two basic objects to comunicate with a database in PinK:

GAF: The Generic Adamo File which is a file using different access modes and drivers and can beaccessed directly from the PinK shell, and
DAD-Connection: A connection to the database via a DAD-server or DAD-pipe.

In PinK these objects each have a set of methods to access, manipulate and insert information stored in the database. The substructure of the database is organized in dataflows and tables which are objects themselfs having methods being independent of whether the dataflow or table comes from a GAF or a DAD-connection. Selectors and Indices are subojects to for customizing the acces to the information in a table.

In general PinK is independent of the structure of a database and it's data definition. Opening a database via the above mentioned objects the entire structure of the data can be transferred to the PinK application thus being independent of a specific implementation of a datamodel.

Another way to use PinK is to indepenindently biuld a database defining it's own structure entirely inside PinK.

This page is maintained by pink@hermes.desy.de; last modification: Jun 16 1995 .