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About Chris McEvoy

During the last four years, I have been working full time on the Nationwide Interact Multimedia Public Access Kiosk project, carrying out the design and implementation of many of the major components of the system, particularly PEP's, Unit Trusts, Mortgages, Savings, Budget Planning. To make this easier, I designed a small, robust and effective toolkit to help us create multimedia presentations and animation viewing systems which are designed for the man off the street to use.

During the previous three years, I was working on a project which involves designing and implementing an extendable user interface wimps toolkit and graphics engine. This is portable across multiple platforms and enables application developers to produce a robust standard user interface onto their underlying applications. The toolkit will be used as a front end and graphics system for the companies current suite of software products.

The system provides a portable set of graphics tools which allow 3D data to be displayed and manipulated by the user in a consistent manner. The developed user interface provides standard windows and menus which can be used by an application on a number of systems.

The toolkit is written in Fortran and C. It was originally developed on a MicroVax and has subsequently been prorted to Sun3's, Sun Sparcstations, IBM RS6000, DEC 5000, Silicon Graphics, Cray and IBM PC. Work was carried out to the clients QA standards which is considered to be accreditable to BS.5750.

In March 1990, I was involved in the development of forms in ORACLE SQL Forms as part of an electricity financial settlements validation system for Nuclear Electric plc.

Between 1985 and 1989 I worked in the advanced information systems Research and Development Group of Rio Tinto Zinc Computer Services Ltd. I joined the group when it was formed by John Cato to research and develop OB4, an advanced object oriented hypertext information management system.

During this time I contributed successfully to each of 8 separate sub-project phases which were geared towards distinct components of the OB4. OB4 was praised by Ovum in their report on the State of the Art of Object Oriented Systems and Databases.

All of the sub-projects were completed successfully on time and within budget. During this time I gained considerable experience of software engineering on a fifteen man year project, particularly in object oriented techniques, human factors, fourth generation languages and information science.

In the development of OB4 I was responsible for detail design, coding, testing and quality control. He managed his own work and was responsible for integrating that work with the other team members contributions. This involved a high level of communication and co-operation between all team members. His major development responsibilities and achievements included i.) DMPL - A Document Manipulation Programming Language. Syntactically an object-oriented language, designed and developed using object oriented techniques. ii.) Inverted File - Detail design and implementation of an inverted file structure which contains mixed text, numeric and date keys and iii.) Access Control - A system by which every object in the system can have controlled access by user role at 255 different levels and five grades of capability at each level.