Re: New Era, is it any good?

> paul@oncology.uthscsa.edu (Paul Robert Acosta) writes: > > > The point here is that nothing from MicroSoft is a standard. Without > neutral parties to hold specifications or true standards, MicroSoft > will always change its APIs to prevent competition. MicroSoft's > attitude remains anti-competitive. > > - Paul This may be a problem, but look at Gupta, Powersoft, Borland+++ Guys, don't make up problems, solve them. OLE2 and OCX support will help a lot though, if implemented properly (that is full support for all functionallity, including beeing able to place an OCX control on a form by drag and drop and having access to all its properties and events). This announcment from Informix has gotten us to decide starting new tests of NewEra as we expect it to become a great product. A comment on MDI: If it is going away, how come Microsoft is still using it even in the brand new Office 95 applications specially made for Windows 95? It's even a very important part of these applications, that users has come to expect as self evidently available. It is also available in most other major Windows applications from lots of vendors. But I can't implement them if I program in NewEra? Understand it those who can. If MDI should go away any time soon it would have to be replaced by something with even better functionallity. Implementing that, whatever it may be, is of course ok. I am not shure it is even possible to implement full support of OCX's without MDI support, as some of the available OCX's are there to support the usage of MDI. As to portability to Motif, I understand Informix's motives for this. My point is that this portability mustn't limit the functionality awaylable under MS Windows, and I don't beleive it has to. Some MS Windows functionality may be difficult to implement under Motif (perhaps OLE2 and OCX's are examples of this), but the Motif version can in that case be a true subset of the MS Windows version. May be some special functionallity in the Motif version is also interesting, that will not be available under MS Windows. That must of course also be accepted. Informix must simply make the best tools, not limiting subsets of what they could have done. Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM-data, Dalsbergstien 7, 0170 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company > > ----- Begin Included Message ----- > > > >Its lack of support for now standard MS Windows user interface controls. > >Examples are multiple doucument interface, tabed dialog boxes (to some extent > >the same thing), OLE2 and more. > >MDI is NOT going away, as some Informix people tried to claim at the last > >Informix user conference. Not very soon at least. > > Microsoft says that MDI is going away. We have no choice but to take their > word for it. OLE2 and OCX support will be available by the end of the year. > > > > >Informix must understand the importance of the user interface. > > We do. We only ask that customers understand that Microsoft keeps changing > their standards, and it takes several months to incorporate major new > features into a product. If we don't get a solid spec from Microsoft > in time, we can't add it to the product. And for now, portability > to Motif is a major issue with NewEra, since NewEra is one of the only > tools on the market with a released Motif version. > > > -- > > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > Randall Rhea Systems Engineer > Informix Software randall@informix.com > > ----- End Included Message ----- >>>>