NewEra 3.0 Postmortem

Hi people, After meddling around with Newera 3.0 I thought I'll share my comments with you. Informix has added some neew features, but don't expect anything revolutionary ! Some of the features should have been in place when they introduced 2.12. I thought when they introduced 3.0 at least it would have the features that are now considerd standard functionality in other products. For instance, Informix claims that 3.0 supports OLE. True to a certain extent, but when other products support OLE2, Newera supports only a stripped down version of OLE1. Newera supports Only embedding, drag & drop, and ocx control features. It doesn't support object linking and OLE automation. Adding visual components such as tabbed windows still requires a bit of overhead. Drag and drop if at all, is limited to a few basic components like buttons, radio buttons, and check boxes. If you need anything else like tabbed windows or list boxes - its there, but you still need to add a bit of code. Also it does not provide readymade 'common dialog boxes'. A new feature with 3.0 is that they have integrated the development environment with a CM tool (Configuration management). Another rather clumsy feature is the integration of codewrite as a main editor. The way its implemented, every time you need to add code behind say a button or for a handler, 3.0 starts codewrite as a seperate application. Codewrite is a good editor, but when you integrate it with a product like this you've got to be more discrete and embedde the product within the application itself. Thats it for now. your comments are welcome ! Chaminda Peries