Re: 4GL/GX Questions

In article <101@analyst.win.net> phillips@analyst.win.net (Charles Phillips) writes: > >Scott, what's your opinion of the 4GL for Windows product. disclaimer: I am a former Informix employee. They are still a client. My opinion of Informix 4GL for Windows (W4GL) is favorable. Conceptually, the ability to leverage 4GL whether in terms of programmer expertise, or existing applications into the Windows environment has value. I believe that 4GL is a powerful language and that it has a place in the MIS toolbox. Windows now becomes another delivery platform and there are classes of applications where that is either required or desired. If you are starting from scratch and are developing exclusively for the Windows/NT environment, other tools must be considered such as Visual Basic/C++, Powersoft and others. I personally have no experience with these products but they appear to offer a lot of functionality. In practice, W4GL 1.0 is exactly that, 1.0. I am always hesitant about the initial release of any product. There are bound to be problems that I don't enjoy spending time dealing with. So far I haven't encountered any problems I couldn't work around. There are behavioral differences between W4GL and 4GL proper. For example, I like the new help mechanism. Rather than overwrite your existing screen with the help screen, a new window is created for the help screen. This allows the user to see the help info and interact with the original screen at the same time. One frustrating behavior is that ring-menus cannot be "displayed" on. A common 4GL programming model is to have a ring menu at the top of a window/screen with a form below. Based on a ring-menu option the user is placed into the form with some instructions "displayed" at the top of the window/screen over the ring-menu. This does not work in W4GL and according to the developers *will not* change. (My solution was to place my ring-menus in small windows and open a new window for the instructions.) > It >looks like an interim step toward true GUI which is the 4GL++. This observation seems correct to me but it may lead some people to an inaccurate view of 4GL++. 4GL++ is truly object oriented which is orthogonal to the GUI aspect. The GUI-ness of 4GL++ is provided by a rich set of visual class libraries that are a part of the product. Of course the visual classes can be inherited and their behavior altered via subclassing. Scott