Re: New Era Pros/Cons
beaumich@texas.net (Mike) wrote: :We are considering upgrading an Informix ISQL-based Unix system, and :would like to know a little more about the pros and cons of converting :to New Era (heavy on the cons, but let's at least pretend to be :balanced). :The system is a military medical MIS, concentrating on logistics and :patient movement, providing lots of statistical analysis and methods :of communications (point-to-point, LAN, WAN). Sounds like security is an issue. I-Net on a PC (Windows) is probably out of the question then. May be (my seemingly beloved) OpenLink ODBC driver could provide part of a solution if you are considering Windows at all on the workstations. : We are using a variety of platforms now (SVR3, Interactive x86, :Solaris 2.4 base-server running the interactive programs, still :supporting some ancient HP-UX 6 & 7 systems and starting to look at :SVR4 and a full X environment). Future development will probably lean :heavily in the Intel direction, but that's not certain (HP-UX 10 has :been mentioned). Your platform choice is of course a key issue. If you plan to continue using Interactive x86, HP-UX 6 & 7 and similar old systems as servers you also limit your options of development systems. You say "Intel direction". Does that mean Unix on Intel or Windows NT? A full X environement - is Windows NT/95 as workstations out of the question? Do you forsee a mix? :Presuming that this group is a mix of people that love Informix and :want to know all about it and people who are stuck with Informix and :don't care much for the idea, we are hoping to get a balance of :opinions before we commit the usual half a million to the folks in :Menlo Park. Of course only NewEra ver. 3.0 and later can be evaluated at all. If that's not the case we don't even have to start a discussion. From ver. 3.0 there is development on Windows NT/95 only. It is supposed to be runable under X-Windows but you would have to find out how well that works. With earlier versions it didn't work without repainting the windows under X according to posters here at C.D.I. If that isn't fixed NewEra is out of the question if you want to run under X-Windows. There are big users of NewEra ver. 2 that seems to be quite happy with it. Ver. 3.0 looks like a significant upgrade that will make it much better. If you intend to use Windows it was very hard to use anything but I-Net (with it's sever security problems). In version 3.0 it seems to become easier to use ODBC (which also have security problems, but that perhaps are possible to handle). For our part we are evaluating Java right now as an alternative. I don't know which is best, and Java is so new I expect it to be at least 6 month to a year until complete medium to large applications can be written with any kind of success, unless you set very hard limits on what you are going to do. With Universal Server a whole new set of requirements are coming up for developement systems. They are so different from the current situation that the old "best" development systems will have to be reevaluated. Universal Server (or it's functionallity) is in everybodys future so that is a key element in evaluating new development systems. It's actually a new chanse for anybody who want to make such systems. Nothing but truly object oriented languages is on the agenda for this of course. (You can't have objects in your database and non in your language.) There are too many if's to say much more, so you will have to clear up them first. Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company