Re: New-Era, how good is it?

Frank Tarzanin (tarzanin@ix.netcom.com) wrote: : My company is currently looking into investing in Informix New-Era as : one of the major technologies to base our consulting bussiness on. : After spending some time reading through the documentation and poking at : it for a bit I've come up with this general impression: : Good Points : ----------- : 1) I like many of the concepts behind New-Era especially the cross : platform/gui portability and the fact that the code can be generated : as C++ code. This should allow developer's to customize the code as : well as protecting whatever investment was originally made into an : application should Informix, for whatever reason, decide to "kill" the : product (not that it would ever happen ... just that I am paranoid that : way.) Agreed. : 2) From what I have gathered it is possible to extend New-Era object : methods via C++ code. This hits me as being rather useful as developers : will not be locked into whatever templates Informix has created. Agreed ... hope I don't ever have to do it myself!! : Bad Points : ---------- : 1) I've heard that New-Era is slow. The development environment is very slow though I have been assured by Informix that it will run much faster on Windows 95. Once an application is running, it doesn't seem too bad. What is very slow in our opinion is the SE engine for windows that comes with it. : 2) New Era seems to not be particularly stable. I've had it fail : several times in one day while poking around in it with a pentium : 60, 16 mb memory and 500 mb free disk space with windows 3.11 using : Informix's SE engine running locally on the windows machine (though I : have to say that at least New-Era seemed to handle the error rather than : gpf). So far we haven't had any problems of this nature. : 3) There seems to be two major products that Informix distributes with : New-Era these being the full blown New-Era and the viewpoint pro. My : general thought being that it looks like there is going to be a BIG : learning curve with this product. If you are familiar with Informix 4GL and C++ then the learning curve shouldn't be too bad. The cumbersome (IMHO) development environment is the thing that has slowed us down the most. : 4) The tool seems to be rather expencive. Probably is a bit too expensive given its relatively ordinary presentation. Our client couldn't understand why you had to pay for run-time licenses as well as buying the software in the first place. (Visual basic mentality). Its worth pointing out that the cost of the runtime compares favourably (usually cheaper) than any ODBC configuration that I have come across so far. We had to demonstrate to the client the benfits of using a major UNIX based RDBMS rather than a DOS/Windows network based engine. It was this that sold it mainly. : If anyone can correct me on any of my general observations please let me : know. If anyone cares to add to these point ... let me know. : If anyone is currently using New-Era on a project and care to give me : general impressions (i.e. how the tool performs, flexibility, Informix : support for New-Era etc.) about how things are working out for them I : would greatly appreciate it. We are stuck with 1.00WE1 at the moment which as far as a "first" major release version goes, is probably better than most first major release products that we have seen. We're hoping to see a number of improvements in the next version or two. We have come from an Informix 4GL environment where we have gotton very used to having very easy access to the database. We could not get comfortable with ODBC in comparison whereas NewEra does have a Informix 4GL heritage that enables us to do a lot of things that would take a circus act in ODBC. Hope all this helps regards Scott.