Re: What development application

David Chamberlain <david.chamberlain@ibm.net> wrote: :We are a small company (< 300 people). Most of out IT department :revolves around Electronic Data Interchange with our customers. We :recieve electronic Purchase Orders and return electronic Advanced Ship :Notices, for example. We are an International Freight Forwarder. : :Most of our applications involve the following: : :1. Receive EDI data of some sort. We have a powerful EDI translator :that will translate this data into the DB. : :2. Manipulate, add information, etc to the data. Here is where we need :a development environment. : :3. Send the value added data out to a customer. Again, we use an EDI :translator for that. : :My desire is for some of the following. : :1. Rapid (really rapid) application development. :2. Connection between the application and data base should be as fast :and painless as possible (read, I would prefer to not have to use ODBC) If you want GUI applications ODBC is fast (reasonably) and painless if you use the OpenLink drivers (http://www.openlinksw.com - server based drivers - not the lite version). The only way to make it simpler and faster is to write server side applications - see below. :3. Robust, stable applications You will probably be able to write your first application the fastest with Visual Basic (and ODBC). It works well and you can make large applications with the latest versions. You will probably write your second and later applications faster and better with Delphi. As I understand from Kerry this possibly works better with Informix I-Connect than with ODBC. That is a little harder to install and have some security problems, but seems to have advantages with Delphi. You could also use PowerBuilder (many seems to do that with success), but I don't like it. The above are for developing GUI based applications. If you can live with character based applications you should check out Informix 4GL if you have a Unix server. The programs will run on the server, and there is no way you can write faster applications with simpler database interfaces than this. It may take a little longer to learn than Visual Basic (not much), but your desire 2 and 3 (fast and painless connection and robust applications) will be much better fulfilled. 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