Re: Your thoughts on Smartware II...

Jeff Bowman wrote: +What happened to Smartware? + +First of all, I'm wondering how it measured (measures) up against 'real' Informix 4GL. My suspicion +is that it was (is) a watered-down version of the real stuff. I do know that Angoss bought it, and +(in my opinion) has handled the whole thing very poorly; tech support at the time I tried (1994) was +abominable (2-3 day wait for a callback), and their sales staff was cocky and rude. As it is now, +I'm waiting for an email reply (2 weeks on the 3rd attempt), just to see where they're at in the +development world. Holy cow, now that's a trip down memory lane! No, Smartware II has absolutley nothing to do with Informix-4gl. It was developed by Innovative Software, which merged with Informix back in, what, 88, 89. Smartware was already an existing product at the time of the merger, as was 4gl. Consider smartware to be a precursor to MS Office (there was a number of "integrated" suites back in them days). It had separate word processing, spreadsheet, report writing, etc. programs, that could be linked together via a scripting language. It had it's own "database", if you could call it that. It was quite a popular product in its time. Smartware experience will contribute nothing toward learning Informix-4gl - it is an altogether different beast. Dave