Re: Yahoo - Informix Revitalizes 4GL Application Development Too

On Thu, 14 May 1998 14:30:25 +0100, Peter Lancashire <Peter.Lancashire.PL1@bayer.co.uk> wrote: >I agree with you about Java's flexibility and probably about it's >future. The stability of its specification is perhaps less clear. There was a great problem with the move from 1.0 to 1.1. Now the specifications are however essentially stable at least at the most important levels. There are some new things coming allong in 1.2 that may break a few things for you. As far as I can see all things will however work with that upgrade, it's only some new features that may make you want to do some things differently in 1.2 as compared to 1.1. There is hardly any way to avoide that type of upgrade problems in such a new product. >The problem is that to get the extra productivity you need more than >Java: you need tools and beans and such. It seems to me that these are >not stable at all in the sense that they are changing all the time. The tools (if you mean development tools) are essentially stable by now. The major ones are IBM's Visual Age for Java and Symantecs Visual Cafe. Of course they will be significantly enhanced, but they will neither go away (any time soon at least) nor be change to become incompatible with code you allready have unless one of these companies does a major error (they can of course, but it isn't any more likely than with any other serious tools vendor). > If >you develop with a tool that disppears you still have the Java source >code it leaves you but then I4GL leaves you with C :-). It's much less likely that any of the tools I mentioned above will dissapear than it is for a lot of tools available for other languages. >Maybe the problem is that 4GL solutions seem to have a much shorter life >than 3GLs. Yes. This is important. > They die like flies: look at Galaxy. Died much from Java competition and that vendors inability of developing a popular Java tool although they tried. May be they would have survived a little longer if they hadn't tried that, but then what would have happened on a longer term? >But writing in 3GLs is >drudge. Yes, but with Java's object orientation and particularly beans it's not much different than the best 4GL's if you use the facilities properly. Probably even better. > Still, there's an awful lot of COBOL around :-). Yes, and that may not be all bad. We do not seem to dissagree much, I just like to have things clear, and may be there are someone else interested. Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html (Now with ODBC info under "Third party products".)