RE: fourgen

We spent alot of money on the a couple of the Fourgen enterprise packages. Here is my experience. The case tools are OK for generating programs that deal with one table. But adding additional tables can easily require extensive modification to the code generated by the case tools. I will use the case tools to generate a simple report, but when I tried to write a conversion program using it, it wrote program in straight 4GL, and wrote the error report using the case tools, then added the 4GL to the error report. Not as clean as I would like it, but the output controls for the report are nice. We used a Fourgen var, and the people we so-so qualified, they were more like hired on programmers, they were NOT experts with the product. Performance was a big issue with Fourgen, it appears to have been designed for clerks to use, which works OK. We tried to convert it to a batch system, so the clerks would only look at exceptions, and performance sucked bad. we pretty much decided to re-write most of the modules in straight 4GL using fourgen tables. This way we can get performance out of the batch jobs, and use the standard fourgen package for the clerks. Initial implementation only took about 6 months, but re-writes for performance are currently on going. If you can handle the performance problems, it implements very quickly. Use of the case tools, needs to be selective. If something is moderately complicated, I tend to code the logic myself and use the case tools exclusivly for any reports and then merge the two together. I provide the logic, and fourgen provides the reporting and user interface. Fourgen is far from being a complete solution, we found out the hard way. If the jobs are very standard, i.e. accounting, it seems to work OK, but adding to much customization can be determental. But overall, since we were not experts in all of the area's needed, the Fourgen product provided us with a base to start, and we replaced the parts as we need to. ===================================================================== Paul Watje Database Something or Another watjep@hasting.com Hastings Books, Music, & Video ---------- From: ilist To: informix-list Subject: fourgen Date: Friday, May 26, 1995 9:00AM My company is getting ready to spend a lot of money on a distribution package created by Fourgen in Seattle WA. Have you used Fourgen? How did you like the case tools created by Fourgen? Were the Fourgen consultants good to work with? What sucks about Fourgen? If you implemented it, how long did it take you to do it? Did the Fourgen case tools help speed development? I like to code in C. Will these case tools take away my power to make the program do what I want? Thankyou very much for your opinions. -- hal@teleport.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with Teleport Public Access UNIX and Internet at (503) 220-1016 (2400-14400, N81)