Re: 4GL / New Era question.

Spetc@aol.com wrote: > > I heard a few new things today, can anyone confirm them? > > 1. It is relatively easy to convert from 4GL to New Era. > Everything is relative ;-) It all depends on your skillset, knowlege of OO design and technique and the complexity of the application. IMHO the answer for 90% of the apps and staff, no. There will be plenty of headaches. > 2. New Era is a healthy product, going places, and will be a big player in > the lucarative > GUI market. Healthy? Maybe. It depends on who you talk to. Since Informix is one of the "BIG 3" (#2 I think since Sybase 11 can't perform), New Era will have a captive market. A lot of companies want to have a single source solution. (Less vendors to yell at ;-) There is a lot of competition. Take Delphi, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, Power Builder... All run with Informix backends thanks to ODBC. > > 3. It is possible for NewEra code, which runs on a PC, to also run on Unix , > character based, terminals with little conversion (where I guess mouse > clicks become keystrokes). ie they use the same source code > stream. ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! Don't let anyone Tell you differently! (Now I know I'll get flamed for this ;-) Informix in their infinite wisdom has decided to reduce their support for the Motif version. They get more bang for their R&D buck on the Windows versions. With 3.0 they are moving more to MFC library compliance. There were some bugs in the 1.0 version of Motif. (I believe that they were using a 3rd party tool for some of their code generation. Can anyone confirm?) Now if you are looking for a character based version of a 4GL, then use Informix's 4GL. Outside of a few quirks, like the lack of dynamic memory allocation, its a solid product. Besides 4GL, the only other way of having a GUI front end for both UNIX and PC would be some form of a Java/HTML browser as a client. Please note that these are my own opinions and milage will vary. Take all that I have said with a grain of salt and realize that some of the comments are said toungue in cheek. -Cheers Mikey