What Is SAS/AF Software?

SAS/AF software is a set of development tools to help you create customized applications. With its interactive development environment and rich set of object-oriented classes, you can rapidly develop and deploy portable, GUI applications that take advantage of other SAS software products. Central to SAS/AF development is the frame, which is an application window that contains the interface elements, such as fields, buttons, and tables. Although the many built-in SAS/AF components are flexible, you can extend them using SAS Component Language (SCL).

SCL is the programming language that controls SAS/AF applications. SCL programs are stored in separate SCL entries that can be accessed by more than one FRAME entry. This means that an SCL program can be written once and used many times.

SCL provides complete object-oriented programming constructs for creating entire object-oriented applications in SCL and for creating and scripting objects with the SAS Component Object Model (SCOM).

For more information about SCOM, see Object-Oriented Development and the SAS Component Object Model. For more information about SCL, see the SAS Component Language: Reference.

SAS/AF software does not support a mainframe build-time environment for FRAME entries. However, mainframe developers can create and modify SCL programs as well as build PROGRAM entries and full-screen applications.

Because SAS/AF applications are stored in SAS catalogs, they are portable to all SAS software platforms. If your site primarily uses a mainframe, you can develop frame-based applications on a PC running Windows, and then port the application to your mainframe. Users who run GUI applications on character-based display devices will see widgets represented as characters that are typical for that host environment.

For more information, see Porting Your Application to Different Operating Environments. For more information about the behavior of classes in specific host environments, see the SAS/AF Component Reference in the online Help.