Re: Dev. Tools for Informix based apps
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. Contrary to what some of the respondents seem to think I asume from this that you want all GUI applications and no character (terminal) based user interfaces in any of the new programs. >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 ... If all you need are client side applications Delphi should work ok. I can't see why it should be any more difficult to support than programs developed in most other tools if you do it all right. If you need server side programs or multi tier applications you are of course lost when using a Unix server. Of course you could program in one language on the client and another (C/C++ or whatever) on the server, but that's hardly my kind of solution. You would be hard put to find developers that could do both well and would get a split in your development organization that would be hard to bridge. >Now i am looking into Unify/Vision and Magic 8. Does anyone >have experience with these tools ? What other tools are available ? Magic is too stupid to even comment a lot on. It's made for users who believe significant things can be done without programming. That isn't true, it never was and it will take a long time to become true if ever. Magic simply locks you in to their way of doing things to an extent that is very far outside what we would even think of. When doing GUI applications you realy need a significant degree of flexibility that can only come from true programming. I don't know much about Unify/Vision. All I can say is I haven't been too impressed from what I have seen on exibitons of this tool. We use Java and the Visual Age for Java development tool from IBM. That is an excelent tool with impressive RAD features that support true OO programming and multi tier programs. Some other tools have significant problems combining all three of these. There are other very usefull Java tools however so you would want to check some out and see what you find best for your tastes. If you are afraid Java isn't mature enough to support significant applications you might want to check out some Java sites to see the kind of applications that have been deployed for some time now. The tools have matured by now to where they work well and you can design high quality GUI, server based and multi tier applications. We have found that we can make applications with user sentered features that go well beyond what we could have done with most other tools and do it both faster and more reliably. If you ask for more information than this I have promised that earlier, but it will still take some time before it is available. I do however plan to write a little report on our findings and make it public at some indeterminate time in the future. Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: Primary with ODBC info: http://www.smooth1.demon.co.uk Official site http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html