RE: Windows development Tools

Hello All! It's one of the lot of opinions in this thread: :With Informix promising to generate Java code form New Era I am asking myself :if we should continue with New Era or plan a complete migration to Java. IMHO, there exists a sort of overestimation of Web-related technologies and some sort of confusion between Internet and HTML and Java. The hypertext is nice for building information systems and sharing and publishing the free-form information in the form of linked formatted text documents. However, all the rest looks like a technology abuse. When we try to add interactive functions and some active behavior, Web browser becomes a plain terminal and nothing more. Instead of modern GUI, the user gets forced to work with the sequential screens slowly changing each other. From the GUI viewpoint, it's the great jump back. Let's recall all the history of computing and user interfaces. It was instant movement from terminals to interactive applications. I see no reasons for this trend to be reversed. It was a real trouble for the companies to migrate their applications from terminals to GUI. This process has already eaten a lot of investments and human resources and still isn't complete. So, investing in plain HTTP as a platform for interactive applications seems to be an investment into potential legacy. Then, the task of reverse engineering of these applications will eat up much more resources than has been saved by this simplified solution. Java as a platform for writing standalone executables seems more attractive. There are still some problems like different versions of JVM, its often misbehaviors, significant problems with printing. However, Java as a development platform has significant drawbacks when compared to OS-targeted development tools. A compiled application will run always, regardless of both support of the language it was written in and absence of such support. Also, some of applications require very definite JVM or their versions. Also, it's now thought of as nearly 'mauvais ton' about complaints on Java applications low performance. A database client application is mostly the user interface engine, and the response of the user interface should be quick, since slow response is not only annoying, but also increases the risk that a confused user will make errors. Also, AWT is a pretty primitive window toolkit. First of all, it's based on some common subset of several GUIs, very approximately resembling Xerox Star. However, any UI element is the integral part of the system, and is reasonable only within some definite interface design style. So, AWT in fact is a collection of UI elements similar, but not directly equivalent to the native ones of target system. For instance, Motif allows a File Open dialog to be modeless, Windows doesn't (though it may be easily circumvented), while OpenLook enforces virtually all of the dialogs to be modeless. Surely, it makes the flow chart of user operations potentially different. For instance, an application relying on a chain of modal dialog will work in Windows, but has a chance to misbehave in Motif and will definitely misbehave in OL.. Surely, I have a chance to be asked, what for to consider Motif and OL. But, if we consider Windows only, we don't need cross-platform tools. In common, using AWT compromises the developer's control over look and feel of the resulting applications. The alternative is to use the custom Java components, for instance 'Java Beans'. In this case, performance of GUI is very low even on Pentium machines with 32M of RAM and a fast disk. So, it seems to me, that it's not a time to drop compilers. We seen 'universal solutions' many times before. We have been promised that Smalltalk virtual machine soon would become the predominant programming platform. Where is it? I don't definitely say that Java's fate will be the same, but a chance still exists. Regards Igor I. Lisyansky