ProdRegProdRegOver 1998, I developed a program for the Solaris division of Sun Microsystems named ProdReg, or the System Registry, along with a usability engineer named Kristen. She kept on running usability tests and finding snags, and I blended it into an application that everybody seemed to like. It was part of Java WebStart, which is what my small department produced. ProdReg, and the database, were needed early on to register products as they were installed by WebStart.
This became a utility in Solaris, starting with version 7, released at the end of 1998. This specific program, ProdReg, often got a favorable mention in reviews of Solaris 7, despite the fact that it was only one part of a massive software product.
Information Week:
Unix Review (now Sys Admin):
One of the many useful tools included with Solaris 7, and accessed through SMC, is the Solaris Product Registry, depicted in Figure 3. The registry quickly and conveniently determines which components of Solaris and other applications have been installed on the system, along with the version number and other product details.
This is a screen snapshot from one of the reviews.
Each item you see is a software product. You click on a product and the information about it appears, examining a variety of system data structures, parsing legacy data if need be. Triangles along the left edge open down to the packages in the product and submodules in greater hierarchical levels of granularity, each supplying a variety of information about that element.
It runs under both Swing and Java 1.1, automatically using the newer depending on whether the Swing classes are available at runtime. I wrote the non-Swing tree outliner. It was translated into ten languages, including Japanese and Chinese.