Re: Dev. Tools for Informix based apps

Hi Peter, I'm going to recommend something that may be a little more complex, and perhaps expensive upfront, but what I believe will pay-off in the end. Use VC++ and DbTools.h++. You will also porbably want to use a good modelling tool like Rational Rose for your object models, use cases, etc. Most people are probably saying he is crazy to use VC++. But I must say that I have first-hand experience with a cross platform tool called MainWinXDE from Mainsoft and it is absolutely superb. And it has no runtimes, to boot. You even get OLE 2.0 support. And you can choose, on the fly, whether to use the Motif look or Windows95/NT look. I did development on NT4.0, copied over my source, ran their utility that creates a corresponding Makefile for UNIX and compiled. It was literally that simple. One of Mainsoft's big testimonies of it's own tool is that they maintain and port Visual Source Safe to UNIX. I believe that last time I checked they said VSS was over 500,000 lines of code and they only had to make minor changes that were very platform specific. They have full support for the Win32 API and MFC, including multi-threading. You already know that DbTools.h++ is cross platform so that's a no-brainer. I also have used this and it works great. Plus you get database independence if that ever becomes important to you. With this combo you have very good portability between platforms and you have a toolset that is robust. If you really need to partition your application further I would look into CORBA. RogueWave has a very nice class library that integrates with Orbix from IONA. I'm currently using Orbix but unfortunately I don't have the RW library. RW tools are a little expensive, but I believe they are well woth it. So far CORBA is pretty slick. It definitely forces you to think very hard about your application architecture, a thing sorely lacking from many applications today. Please feel free to flame me or back me up! I'm very interested to see what others are up to! Perry Dillard Shop Floor Solutions, Inc. On Tue, 03 Mar 1998 16:07:42 +0100, Peter Eckhardt <dbadm@transcom.de> wrote: >We are going to develop a medium sized (200 seats) in house >application. It will cover the complete document >management, logistics and communication functions requiered. >The server side is Informix 7.22 on a Unix machine the clients >are running NT 4.0. The new app should have a GUI, at the time >we have a terminal based interface. > >First approach was to use "low level" tools such as Borland >Delphi. But the estimated times to develop a reliable product >with these tools seems to become too long and support will >probably become a nightmare ... > >Now i am looking into Unify/Vision and Magic 8. Does anyone >have experience with these tools ? What other tools are available ? > >Thanks for help > >Peter