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User interface

Depending on how you look at it, OmniMark has either the most sophisticated user interface of any programming language, or no user interface at all.

OmniMark has no built-in commands for communicating with the user while the program is running. There is no equivalent to Basic's input or C's scanf. Nor is there any window management facility. OmniMark is designed for creating programs that run either in batch mode or as servers, so complex communication with the local user is not appropriate.

On the other hand, OmniMark excels at parsing information, and is therefore adept at communicating with other programs by means of messages. This gives OmniMark great user interface flexibility. You can create a user interface to an OmniMark program or server in any language, on any platform, over any network that supports TCP/IP. This may include many different user interfaces for different users. A web browser makes an excellent user interface tool for an OmniMark server. (After all, OmniMark is the most powerful server-side programming language for the web.)

Ways of communicating with an OmniMark program or server include:

• The command line. You give initial instructions to an OmniMark CI program on the command line.
• The console. Running OmniMark programs and servers can output messages to your screen (technically, the standard output of your particular operating system).
• Log files. You can have your OmniMark program write messages to a log file or logging process.
• Web pages. Your OmniMark server can create web pages on the fly to present information to the user.
• Web forms. You can use web forms to allow the user to send information to your OmniMark server. URLs that point to your OmniMark server also communicate information to the server.
• Custom clients. You can program a GUI application in the language of your choice and communicate with an OmniMark server using TCP/IP. (This works on a local machine as well as over a network.)
• File-based integration. You can communicate with an OmniMark program by exchanging files. For example, your GUI-based application could write out a file and invoke an OmniMark program to process that file. The OmniMark program would process the file and write out the result to the file specified by the calling application.

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