PAF for OS/2-
A Neat Solution to Enter a New World of Software

PAF for OS/2 is the base requirement for using and developing PAF applications under OS/2. It also is good point to start the migration from OS/2 to the forthcoming aerolithe PC platform driven by aerolitheOS. Besides this, the package itself adds a lot of value to your system: PAF comes with built-in PDF base support thus it allows your local and remote OS/2 systems to produce PDF files up to and including PDF specification 1.7 while eliminating additional and tiring installation procedures of freeware patchwork products.

Availability and Current Package Edition
The current version of PAF for OS/2 is 1.20. PAF for OS/2 is shipped with our PAF application class software packages as free supplement. Once you got the package you can use it on as many systems as you like.

Distribution and Updates
Redistributing PAF is not allowed. Besides this you can use it freely. Updates can only be downloaded via FTP from our update server for free. Connect to ftp.fimicro.com and login with the account data shipped with your software package or Migration Passport.

System Prerequisites
OS/2 Warp 3 with FP 36 or any other higher version of OS/2 including WSeB and eCS. Past experience has shown that OS/2 Warp 4 system should have been fixed with FP 10.

Differences Between Standard PAF and PAF for OS/2
PAF for OS/2 mainly consists of the same code and components as the standard PAF package. This allows developers to write their code under OS/2 and execute it later on aerolithe PCs and any of our hardware solutions, i.e. on aerolitheOS without any changes. However, the OS/2 edition of PAF slightly differs from the embedded product:

• The graphic interface of PAF for OS/2 uses its own window and control classes. Thus the appearance of PAF application classes is not affected by the current settings of OS/2.
• Some inter document and document-part related operations of PAF application classes are deactivated under OS/2 since WPS is used as user interface by default and not PAFShell.
• I/O services rely on the OS/2 file system API instead of POE services since PAF for OS/2 bases on SOM, not on POE and SOM does not support the POEStacks package. It is too time consuming to port the aerolitheOS I/O subsystem to OS/2, therefore note that PAF usually does not support hardware that is not supported by OS/2 and accessible via OS/2's file system API.
• The ISS (Installable Security Subsystem) cannot be used as long as PAFShell is deactivated (see below).

These differences are transparently to both, programmers and users and appear on the base layers of the runtime only (except for the GUI issue). For this reason there are no functional impairments of the OS/2 edition of PAF with regards to application compatibility. Note that higher versions of PAF for OS/2 contain support for PAFShell under OS/2. You can therefore eliminate some of the differences above mentioned by activating this shell.

poeREXX Support and Software Development Tools
poeREXX is a dialect of IBM's well known ObjectREXX language and a built-in feature of POE. Since PAF for OS/2 builds on SOM that does not know anything about poeREXX, PAF for OS/2 includes full poeREXX support and all necessary software development tools that are normally part of the original POE component of aerolitheOS. This enables programmers to write their new applications with an advanced object oriented REXX environment on OS/2.