Re: Universal Server

Michael Gould wrote: > I am surprised not to have seen discussion, at least during the past few > weeks that I've been looking, of the Universal Server product. Universal is not available to all platforms and, more important, it's not the kind of server that present aplications need. Universal is the server for the next generation of applications. I think very few people have already started to create such applications. > Any (beta) users wish to comment on what's so special about it? Is it > better than "pure" odbsm on the market in any special way? We are doing some experiment with Illustra, that brought most of the innovation. We are preparing to move to Universal one of these days. Do you remember the pain to put images in a Wordstar printout? Then Edit/Copy/Edit/Paste came along, and it was so easy!... Illustra/Universal is the same. It's so easy to create applications that process image, real text, maps, etc., that it's even difficult to decide where to start. You don't have to integrate several tools. It's all in one place. Easy to manage. Easy to develop. I see oly one problem: the development tools. New Era is not (yet?) ready. It's a very good language but lacks a good RAD environment. It may never catch up with MS, Borland or Symantec. Maybe Java/JDBC will do it. > We are thinking of acquiring it for multimedia (including spatial) > database work. The current available DataBlades can start you in that direction. Many others will follow, always with more power. If you are a full-power GIS user you might feel some limitations right now, mainly because of the lack of applications. If you will be developing GIS applications, however, I think it's the best platform you can choose. Fernando ______________________________________________________ Fernando Fernandez fernandez@despodata.pt Despodata http://despodata.pt