Informix's Official NewEra Three Year Plan

NewEra Three Year Plan Tools Product Management October 24, 1997 OVERVIEW The objective of this announcement is twofold: 1) to clarify Informix's position on NewEra 2) to provide customers with the current development and support schedule. The message is simple: "Informix is committed to supporting NewEra customers by delivering significant quality improvements and minor enhancements as part of a three year plan to ensure that NewEra continues to be a viable product." NewEra is a mature product with a rich feature set that appeals to developers who care about robust, high performance applications for Enterprise users. NewEra is a highly productive developer tool and a sophisticated, object oriented language significantly enhanced with new features released in Version 3.1 (released in September 1997). INTRODUCTION This paper is an update to the NewEra roadmap first released in 1996. The roadmap reinforces the intent of Informix to maintain NewEra as a viable and competitive product. Informix will continue to promote NewEra to customers and partners who demand a robust Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with the developer productivity of an object-oriented fourth generation language with scalability for enterprise applications. In the first quarter of 1997, the priorities of the Informix Tools Group shifted to place more emphasis on INFORMIX-Data Director. As a consequence, the number of new features scheduled for NewEra was refined to address the market for proprietary tools. Informix has released NewEra with many new features, improved the quality, made it more robust, and given it better platform support - all with substantial benefits to the customer. Also, NewEra 3.0 Motif, NewEra 3.0 Character, and NewEra 3.1 Windows have all been released in the last few months. The release of these new features is progress which validates the ongoing investment for NewEra. The plan moving forward is to focus development efforts on improving the stability and quality of the product. As with any plan, it will be periodically reviewed in light of changes in the market and revised accordingly. DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE The development schedule for the next year focuses on improved quality and completion of features introduced in the 1997 Version 3.1 release. 3Q97 1Q98 2Q98 4Q98 Feature Dev. Java clients Maint. Release Maint. Maint. IUS Connectivity Sync Motif & Release Release Quality Char VCLs Platforms Motif Deployment Character Terminal Deployment SUPPORT Support for products at Informix fall into four categories, in brief: Category 1: Full Enhancement Major enhancements and bug fixes Category 2: Full Maintenance Minor enhancements and bug fixes Category 3: Limited Maintenance Bug fixes only Category 4: Time and Materials Bugs fixed on a time and materials basis The full descriptions of these categories are available at the Informix TechInfo Center web site. The next table shows how the status for NewEra support will change in January 1998. 1997 1998 1999 NewEra 3.X Category 1 Category 2 Category 2 NewEra 2.X Category 3 Category 3 Category 4 NewEra 1.X Category 3 Category 4 Category 4 NEWERA - FEATURE OVERVIEW The NewEra Integrated Development Environment (IDE) employs a repository and a repository browser with powerful, interactive support for the creation, management and re-use of Classes. The repository, (running on INFORMIX-SE), offers visual interaction with the Classes that ship with NewEra. THE NEWERA IDE IS COMPRISED OF: > NewEra Window Painter, an interactive application that allows the user to drag and drop controls to compose user application screens; > NewEra Class Browser, and associated repository for interactively viewing and maintaining NewEra classes; > NewEra Application Server, an application server to support a 3-tier architecture; > NewEra Partitioning Wizard, a wizard that steps the developer through the process of dividing an application into client tier and the Application Server tier; > NewEra Compiler, Debugger, and Language Editor, a highly integrated set of tools for rapid interactive application development and debugging enabling code stepping, object traces, and break points for developers to interactively debug NewEra source code; > NewEra Application Builder, a graphical interface for developers to manage the versions and software assets that comprise NewEra applications; > NewEra Deployment Class Libraries, that provide maximum reuse of application components for developers and simplify the configuration and management of the runtime environment; > Character Class Library, for the deployment of NewEra applications to character environments; > Visual Class Library, for the deployment of NewEra applications to Windows or X11/Motif platforms; and, > Connectivity Class Libraries, that provide direct connection to Informix databases and connection to Sybase and Oracle databases through ODBC. WINDOWS NT The NewEra IDE, the deployment environment, and the NewEra Application Server are Generally Availability on Microsoft Windows NT. Developers can work in the Windows NT environment and deploy their applications in an entirely Windows NT architecture - INFORMIX-Dynamic Server is available on Windows NT and the NewEra Application Server can be deployed as a middle tier running on Windows NT. MULTI-TIER CLIENT DEPLOYMENT NewEra applications can have thin clients with the business logic of the application running on an application server (the NewEra Application server.) Developers use the NewEra Partitioning Wizard to divide the application into two parts: the presentation layer and the application layer. The presentation layer includes the graphical user interface and presentation layer of the application. The application layer runs on a separate, more powerful server, to share the business logic processing work load of the application. NEWERA IS OPEN OCX Controls. NewEra 3.0 supports the use of OCX (open component executable) controls in NewEra applications, allowing NewEra to leverage the wealth of OCX components available to Windows developers. OLE Automation. The Microsoft Windows platform relies upon OLE to allow desktop applications to communicate and share information. NewEra applications can use OLE to interact with other Windows applications. NewEra Application Servers can interact with OLE client applications. Thus NewEra is seamlessly integrated with the Windows environment and Windows applications written in other languages (Visual Basic, Java or C++.)