Re: 4gl <-> New Era

Cathy Kipp (ckipp@vth1.vth.colostate.edu) wrote: : David Schnardthorst writes: : ->I am currently looking for some software that can help port applications : ->from Informix-4gl to New ERA. Specifically, all of the before and : ->after field logic needs to be maintained. : I'm going to go ahead and post this since I've seen quite a few questions : asking essentially this same question. I have received information in the : mail from The Technology Group which says they have "the first comprehensive : tool to convert INFORMIX-4GL applications to NewEra". : [...] I know of this company, met the owners, and have seen a demo of the product, including samples of generated source code. The most interesting thing it does is read your existing .per files, and generate NewEra .wif files automatically with essentially the same information. The code generator only runs on Unix. During the demo, they just ftp'd the .wif files over to a PC to run the NewEra compiler. In my opinion, it works well to do what it is designed to do, but is not a well-integrated solution. They (TTG) used a minimum-effort to port the code: the DISPLAY, INPUT, etc. statements are replaced with function calls which invoke NewEra objects to perform the equivalent action. Otherwise, they produce 4GL code. My programs are starving for a real object-oriented environment. Someday when I have the luxury of time I'm going to build some foundation classes for NewEra program development; that is, do it the "right way" from ground up. I'm tired of having to copy and modify code to make little changes. The project I'm now working on already has over 50,000 lines of code for only a few programs, largely due to the absense of code reusability. I dream of using class inheritance and loose binding, so every program inherits a default behavior and only has to specify "business rules." All things considered, the TTG tools are probably a good choice during migration, but poor in the long run IMHO. -- Jeff Sturm ZenaComp Inc. jsturm@zenacomp.com