Re: New-Era, how good is it?

>Bad Points >---------- >1) I've heard that New-Era is slow. The only performance problem I have noticed is when there are a LOT (e.g. 200 or more) objects in a NewEra window, and this was only in the initial load of the window. For heavy-duty scientific number crunching, it is best to drop down to C (which can easily be done with the BEGIN_C statement) As far as database access and general performance goes, it seems to do very well. >2) New Era seems to not be particularly stable. Compared to other Windows tools, this seems to me to be an advantage of the product. Powerbuilder GPFs several times a day, requiring re-boot of the PC. I seldom have that problem with NewEra. Just about everything on my PC has more GPF problems than NewEra, including MS Word. >3) There seems to be two major products that Informix distributes with >New-Era these being the full blown New-Era and the viewpoint pro. My >general thought being that it looks like there is going to be a BIG >learning curve with this product. True, this is an object-oriented tool with a learning curve. But I learned it, so I think most programmers can too. >4) The tool seems to be rather expencive. Compared to Visual Basic, yes. But Microsoft can afford to give away their products. The rest of us have got to make money. The price for a development copy is about the same as Powerbuilder Enterprise. The runtime fee is about the same. Yes, there is a runtime fee for VB and Powerbuilder, it's called I-Net and an ODBC driver if you use ODBC. For an interesting discussion on runtime fees, see the recent Gartner Group article on the subject, where they use the term "software slumlord" to refer to tools companies that charge no runtime fee. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Randall Rhea Systems Engineer Informix Software randall@informix.com