Re: Client/Server Development thoughts

Scott McClintock (scott@vetpath.vet.uq.oz.au) wrote: : Hi, : We have just found out that we need to develop a package very quickly. From : past experience, we believe that it would take about 8-10 weeks to do the : job in RDS/4GL (using our own 4GL code generators!). The powers that be : want it done in about 4 weeks and with Windoze front ends! (ie telnet session : isn't good enough!). Much of the tricky processing etc can be handled with : SPL and triggers but our experience in developing Windows Client Server stuff : is fairly limited (have done masses of 4GL stuff though). We need to work : out the best way of doing it. There will be plenty of "Non-trivial" screens : to write. The following is a list of some of the possibilities. We would : appreciate any thoughts on these options: : 1) NewEra : 2) ODBC - Visual C++ } : Visual Basic } - They already own dev tools for these 3. : 3) Powerbuilder } : 4) Magic : 5) Run away to a South Pacfic Island. : 6) Other..................... : The DB will have some tables with upwards of 1 million rows. There will : typically be up to about 20 simultaneous users (mostly simple quick queries : though some big reports). They have a 90Mhz Pentium running SCO Unix : and SE 5.02 available to run the show. : Are we crazy?? I hope not ... I tested NewEra and PowerBuilder. IMHO, NewEra is a better programming language (and looks like 4gl), but to write some complex application you must create a lot of intermediate classes. NewEra window painter, application builder client seems to be slow even if your computer has 16MB of RAM, and if you have 8, it will work, but you or your customers not. My test application with 2 screens takes about some minutes to compile p-code and about 20 seconds to run it (.dll runs faster, but it takes more time to build it) So debugging and even training, especially you are novice is problematic. Implementation of the NewEra's heart - SuperTable is very bad. It's enough to say that Grid form SuperTable is cleared and refreshed each time as you use its vertical scrollbar or even touch new field. I'v found some other bugs with non-ASCII curillic characters. I choose PowerBuilder. It's less resource-hungry than NewEra and works fine on my 8Mb computer. It provides a possibility to develop applications that looks like MS Word or Excel - with MDI windows, toolbars, etc. It has integrated environment, supports OLE2 etc. All these possibilities are not supported in NewEra. I found that development time with PowerBuilder is much less. WBR, Vadim J. Nikitin