Re: XDP 4.0 and Informix 5.03

Jonathan Leffler <johnl@informix.com> wrote: >I suspect that XDP is little used. Is XDP an o/s or is a machine? (Andrew looks up at Jonathan, resplendant on his throne as king of c.d.i and throws a stick to try to knock his hat off...) When was the last time you played with Optical? You may not have noticed, but Informix Optical isn't actualy capable of dealing with Optical devices. You need to get some third party software to link to the optical executable, to handle the jukebox and drives. Whilst this could, in theory be supplied by anyone, it is, I believe, in every case a Plexus XDP product, such as XDP Storage Manager. XDP Storage Manager allows the user to configure multiple jukeboxes and standalone drives, it organises read and write and platter swap requests for maximum efficiency and all the housekeeping tasks involved in running the optical subsystem. Without XDP Storage Manager, Informix Optical is of little use. Also of note is XDP Data Manager which was developed from Informix Turbo, adding the Blob and Optical support which was completely missing from the Turbo product. This allowed our customers to use the Blob-on-Optical technology so central to the image handling part of the industry, well before any such solution was available from Informix. This is now largely superceeded by Online, but is still in use in the field. Plexus also produce XDP Application Designer, which is derived from Informix 4GL, compiled to run under MS Windows against an XDP Datamanager or Informix On-line back end, with support for Windows Forms, Scanners, Image de/compression, printing and display. This gave our customers front-end imaging support when New-Era was but a twinkle in Informix's eye. Hmmm... this is beginning to sound too much like an advert - If we sell more of it, I'll only have to support more of it... Andrew