Re: Dev. Tools for Informix based apps

Hi, Sorry about my english. We have been using Magic on AIX for three years. The version we use is 5.X. That's because newer versions only support GUI and we have character based terminals. As far as I know version 6 is version 5 for GUI. Version 7 is version 6 without bugs. I've seen version 8 beta and it added a few new features (example: web support). I don't like Magic. It is true you can develop your application faster, but support is painful. Magic wants you to develop your programs the Magic way. The philosophy is that there is just one way to do a given task in Magic, so reviewing a program should be easy. The reality is far different. There's one way to do the tasks Magic can do but you can design a lot of tasks that can't be programmed in the Magic way, and I'm talking about things that are trivial in VB or Delphi. When that happens you have to do many, many work-arounds to have the work done. It's not easy to review one of those programs. Moral: do just what Magic can do and do it the Magic way or suffer the consequences. One of the Magic's claims is that they have said NO to code. That's true: you don't have source code. Your program are stored in a table in a special format that only Magic can interpret. The moral is: when that information get corrupted (and it happens from time to time) you're in trouble. You can't just restore the damaged "programs" (magic programs is that in most languages is called procedures or functions) from a backup because all programs are stored together in an "application" (You would overwrite newer "programs"). There is a feature that translates between the Magic's binary format and an ASCII format. You can apply that tool to a single program in the backup application and import the ASCII file in the current application to restore the lost program. However it is not that easy. As Magic have said NO to code, the programs and data files are referenced by numbers. So the program you have restored doesn't call the program "calculate_total", it calls progam #80 and it doesn't use the table "employees", it uses file #20. Imagine what happens if you have added new tables or programs that doesn't exists in the backup application: all reference numbers are changed, you'll have to review all the calls and the all the forms and expressions (fields that existed in old file #20 and doesn't exists in new file #20 just disappears). I've programmed in Clipper, Pascal, VB, Delphi, C, C++ and Magic. Believe me, the latter is the only one I wouldn't recommend to anyone in any circumnstance (unless he is dating with my wife) Guillermo Labatte Rio Uruguay Seguros -----Original Message----- From: Peter Eckhardt <dbadm@transcom.de> To: informix-list@iiug.org <informix-list@iiug.org> Date: Martes 3 de Marzo de 1998 14:09 Subject: Dev. Tools for Informix based apps >We are going to develop a medium sized (200 seats) in house >application. It will cover the complete document >management, logistics and communication functions requiered. >The server side is Informix 7.22 on a Unix machine the clients >are running NT 4.0. The new app should have a GUI, at the time >we have a terminal based interface. > >First approach was to use "low level" tools such as Borland >Delphi. But the estimated times to develop a reliable product >with these tools seems to become too long and support will >probably become a nightmare ... > >Now i am looking into Unify/Vision and Magic 8. Does anyone >have experience with these tools ? What other tools are available ? > >Thanks for help > >Peter >