Re: Choose New Era???

djames@statsci.com (Daniel James) wrote: :Cosmo Lee wrote: :> :> Yes, Informix doesn't seem to be pushing New Era very vigorously on :> their web page. They still only have information on Version 2.0, and :> they don't even mention that it is available for Unix machines. : :My understanding is that New Era is no longer going to be supported on :Unix. Somebody please tell me that I'm wrong, and that Informix isn't :going to follow the rest of the world in jumping off the Microsoft :bridge of death? You are half wrong, half right. Very few developers who develop the type of applications you can properly do with NewEra now use anything but MS Windows as their client OS. This is a simple fact of reality that's hard to get arround. It's therefore not easy for any company to maintain a presence on other OSes and still earn money in the process. Also the Microsoft OLE/ActiveX technology gives tremendous advantages in designing graphical user interfaces, particularly for bussiness type of applications. OLE/ActiveX simply has to be supported in any serious GUI tool. This however is impossible to carry over to Unix/X-Windows/Motif. Even though Microsoft now claim that ActiveX is going to be available on Unix (Software AG in Germany are even doing some work on this strangely enough), very few will make ActiveX controls available under Unix. They are simply to hard to port, and the market is too tiny. Any port of NewEra to Unix then would have been without OLE/ActiveX support for all practical purposes. Still Informix did once say that it would be possible to create a program with a GUI on MS Windows and compile it on Unix. I don't know if this is still an option. I also doubt it would work very well (difficult to make the screen layout the same on both platforms), and it would not include the OLE/ActiveX controls. If you look at other tools for developing GUI applications on Unix most of them have very limited GUI tools compared to what you do so easily on MS Windows. There are still a few exceptions, but it's hard to keep that up in the face of thousands of developers creating all kinds of GUI controls on MS Windows. It's realy sad to think about how utterly stupid the whole Unix industry have been in never seeing this coming. It was so clear years and years ago, but the Unix afficionados kept talking about techinical superiority and kept competing among each other in making a "better" Unix. Nobody bother about making a unified Unix, and particularly a Unified GUI so development could start moving forward. O well, it's all spilled, and MS Windows works ok for now. Stupidity at this fantastic level never realy deserved to win anyway. Now for server code for the purpose of creating partitioned application it's another issue. Here we talk about objects with no GUI. It's the bussiness logic. This is supported by Informix. You can compile these with only a C/C++ compiler and a library (may be there is a kind of NewEra compiler as well) on the Unix machine after having developed them on your MS Windows . A problem seems to be that Informix is currently planning on only a few platforms. I don't even know if they will support NT as a server, but assume they will. Anything else would be a realy bad idea. Conclusion: GUI on MS Windows and server side bussiness logic on Unix (or Windows NT). There is however an all out attack on this Microsoft centric GUI development view going on from virtually every company in the computer industry named Java. It solves several serious problems with the above senario (too thick clients beeing one of the more serious ones, but there are several other significant problems). It still has some problems of its own, where top notch GUI design tools is probably the most important one. (The Unix gurus never did grasp why users wanted what they view only as bells and whistles - they have lost so much on this unvillingness to grasp elementary things - is there a chanse this time? Will they *finally* grasp it before it's too late?) By now it has become clear that Java is going to be sucessfull, although it's not yet clear just how sucessfull. Worst case another tool in the jungle, best case Microsoft might tremble. My thinking slowly starts to go toward the last. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org