Re: Which Front End to Choose for Development

mjgator@aol.com (Mjgator) wrote: :I am really in a quandry these days. Lived with 4GL for a long time. Am now :developing in New Era. Talk to the Informix support group and they say NE is :scheduled to be a "live" product for about 2 more years. After that, who :knows. Well..who DOES know? The Informix database engines seem fairly stable, :but for new development projects that will be in existence for MORE than 2 :years, what does anyone predict would be the best front end to use for graphic :screen development? I have heard 4GL may meet its demise also. Crystal :Reports and its ilk are fine for fairly simple reports, but none have the power :of a 4GL report. Does anyone in this group have predictions, recommendations :for possibilities on "where to do from here?" I'm at a loss! : :Thanks...MJ In addition to David's excelent review I would say that Java have the edge. Major applications are now beeing written in it. Good tools are awailable. IBM Visual Age for Java is one. We will look more at Borlands JBuilder. Symantec Visual Cafe is ok, but seem to have some limitations as to how objects are used. When drawing a field on screen it should be bound to a variable in an object, not to a database column directly. IBM Visual Age for Java does this very nicely, while we still need to find out how JBuilder does this. There is still some flux at the base level of Java. The JFC (Java Foundation Clases) are still in beta for one, and you realy want to use that. Microsoft's lack of support for true java is a minor problem. Microsoft, an otherwise nice company, be damned when it comes to Java. Never touch any of their "Java" tools. They are out to kill Java and you with it. If they manage to do that we might all end up with nothing but MS Windows on clients and servers in the end. For web applets there are of course some problems (but if you use any other tools there are no web applets at all - ActiveX does *not* count). It can be made to work though. For applications Java is fine. Although there may be some problems even with Java in using an application on multiple platforms that's not a major problem for development. The key is that we can use the same language and tools for server and client side development. No other tool (with the exception of the overly expensive ones like Forte) give you that if you want to be able to run on Unix as well as Windows NT servers and any one or a small set of clients. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org