Re: NewEra, is it any good?

> Mike Aubury <mike@lintel.demon.co.uk> writes: > In article: <3qobhp$h9h@tulpi.interconnect.com.au> > adamg@interconnect.com.au (Adam Green) writes: > > > > Upgrade from INFORMIX-4GL is extremely solid and complete. Under close > > examination, NewEra _is_ 4GL. > > > > Adam > It might have changed but from my experience, 4gl->new era involves getting > rid of ALL screen interaction statements, > > menu, open window, open form, input, construct, display, prompt, > message, error .... > > All go ? > Easy ? > > Ok - it will read in your forms but as most people know - the validation is > the bit that takes the time to do... > >>>> It would probably have been easy to do a translation of some of these statements (display, prompt, message...) but the big problem is the input statement and to some extend construct. I doubt that it is possible to convert these and still retain a proper event driven interface. You would end up in some kind of input "mode" limiting what the user can do. I think Informix has done right in making New Era a fully eventdriven system also for the resulting programs. If they didn't we would end up with something like 4GL for Windows is - not what we want. To move to a GUI and eventdriven programming from something that wasn't requires a substantial effort. This is unfortunate, but I think it is worth it in the long run. Informix has also announced a character interface version. This hopefully means implementing all these statements so old programs could be compiled easily with NewEra. They would still not work in a event driven environement though, but we could use only one compiler. Alternatively they may also implement an event driven character based interface. The idea behind that is to be able to use new programs designed in NewEra for a GUI interface also on a character interface. (Remember, you shouldn't need a mouse for a well designed database oriented program, even in a GUI environement, so this would work.) For us that is hardly interesting. One of the benefits of a GUI is finaly to get rid of the 24 by 80 limitation of screens. If you limit your GUI interface to be displayable on a 24 by 80 character screen, you also limit most of your GUI programs to not be as user frendly as they could be - by far. With the annoncement of OCX and OLE2 support in NewEra within the end of the year we are going to convert significant parts of our applications (300.000 lines of 4GL code) to see if it works the way they claim. As this consists of a large number of individual programs, we will convert one by one, and let the users run the others in a terminal emulator under Windows in the meantime. I know our users will be very happy if we get the performance they need. We will report. I don't know of anything with a better basic arcitecture than New Era, so if the user interface part gets fixed we expect it to help us out. Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM-data, Dalsbergstien 7, N-0170 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company