Our experience in using SuperNova Informix Extender for mission

Hi, After seeing some interest posted to "informix-list" with regards to the newly announced SuperNova Informix Extender product, we would like to share the experience that we have had so far with it, something we worked on from June/July 1998 until now, resulting in our customer running in testing mode on Sept 1998, and live on Dec 1998. We are modest R&D company, fully owned by our parent company, which is an Informix VAR, IBM BP for RS/6000 and PCs, Cisco and 3M VAR, in Malaysia. We have applied and obtain the MSC (Multimedia Supercorridor) status. We develop and our principal company market a few application solutions that are mainly on Informix 4GL running with IDS Ver 7. These applications are mainly targeted towards : a) healthcare administration, b) state government accounting c) and municipal collections. Many state hospitals, university hospitals and private hospitals runs our application INFOMED. And many municipals in a few states in Malaysia. In response to a growing demand for new functionality and modernization of the application we started to look for tools that could help us extend our application. We have found that SuperNova Extender useful for our purposes. It allows us to compile existing Informix 4GL application, that allows us to add GUI (or allows us to 'beautify' the generated GUI dialogs - - that originate from the associated .per form source file) to it. This also allows us to develop new simple functions that seamlessly interacts with the Extender executables. Along the way, we have work with 4Js product (or what is now called Informix D4GL), on 3 occasions, where once we work directly with one of their experts from Australia. The one think we see, from maintenance and productivity is that we can add on things, related to the user interface, on the dialogs object itself (this is the thin presentation layer, that sits on the PC client) -eg. buttons that trigger a few lines of codes to get start another function, moving things around (within the specific types of ways allowed by the tool). The converted Dialogs are real Windows dialogs. There have also been some challenges. We use Informix RDS for both development and production. Our I4GL source codes being use to compile with the SuperNova extender I4GL compiler (Querix) gave us some technical problems, eg. cursor movement, un-initialised variables, etc. - - mainly due to fact that the SuperNova Extender I4GL compiler is much stricter then RDS. In our project, we work very closely with SuperNova, and they had to implement a lot of changes to accommodate our RDS 'freestyle' code that has about 4 'flavours' to it, as we have about 4 major styles in coding standard, depending on the 'look and feel' we need to put in place for our different products. In total we have about 800 .4gl and about 1,500 .per to work through - - "special navigation effects" for financial type of functions, purchase order - - header and detail types of functions, hospital administration type, etc. Now at least they support most of our RDS code, with a few more small items currently being looked into. I suppose this is expected due to the size of our applications (all products) Thanks. Regards, Khoo Phaik Lin R&D Manager, Mesiniaga MSC Sdn Bhd (fully owned by Mesiniaga Berhad)