Informix & Progress

To: reesl@zeus.swindon.rtsg.mot.com who wrote: LR> Anyone got any info on Progress 4GL ? Not really, but I thought I'd opine, anyway! :-) LR> Has anyone had good/bad/indifferent experiences with this 4GL at all ? My experience is very limited, basically a day-long test drive. My impression was that it was an awful lot! There seem to be bazillions of commands and options and variations on themes. Also, whenever it's been demo'ed to me, everyone shows me the same thing, which makes me think that there's only one thing that's easy to do in Progress, the rest is murder. :) I have also been a party to the only time I have heard of someone switching database/4GL; and they went from Progress to Informix. The problem they had was that V7 Progress is only available in a Windows/Motif/OpenLook type environment (for development) and the runtime for character environments was still vapourware. I don't know if this is still the case. I was fairly appalled to discover some of the missing features in earlier versions that had only been fixed in V7. Progress are also relative latecomers to SQL, unlike Informix-4GL which has always been SQL based. From a philosophical point of view, Informix-4GL seems to be the "C" of 4GL's (?) - small command set, very well suited to complicated apps and almost able to do anything. Progress seems to come from the school of "if it's slightly different, let's provide another command for it." As a programmer coming from a 3GL background, I found Informix-4GL absurdly easy to learn. Progress appeared more daunting and I certainly found it less intuitive. LR> How does it compare to Informix ? As a database, Progress doesn't come close. Just look at the number of people benchmarking officially (TPC-type benchmarks) in Informix. As a 4GL, well, it's horses for courses. There seem to be a fair number of packages in Progress. I don't know if they have a similar run-time licensing deal, etc. Here in the newly-democratic People's Republic of South Africa, we (as Informix developers) don't come across them too much, they don't seem to be doing particularly well. Perhaps it's my comfort zone, but I really am very partial to Informix-4GL. With a reasonable amount of effort and planning you can really achieve pretty awesome results. Within my company, we have written 3 different code generators for different target markets, we have a code analyser and beautifier and we've written some really heavy apps in (IMHO) amazing times. [Our latest mind-bending accomplishment was to develop a full medical aid package, for resale, in 24 days between 3 people. The expected time (given by a DP manager, who had experience of doing this in PowerHouse) was 6 months for a full team of programmers. (Nobody has believed this since we did it, so it doesn't really help to brag about it! :))] Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Informix-4GL can develop apps as quickly as any other 4GL and can go a lot further than some as well. I think 4GL's and databases always have a bit of a "swings and roundabouts" going on, you have to way up support, pricing, skills base, etc. I've also found Informix's flexibility to be quite impressive. Even if you run into a bug (yes, they do exist!), you can probably program around it, often in half-a-dozen different ways. If you're going to be in a very database-intensive environment (high concurrency, big tables, etc.), definitely go Informix. Otherwise, check the functionality you need from the language. Just remember, if Informix doesn't have it built in, you can probably fake it somehow! That's my 6.6 (SA) cents worth! Regards, billy.wheeler@digitec.co.za --- . SPEED 1.40 [NR] . *Four hours* to bury a cat? Yes - it wouldnt keep still ---- Digitec Online - 20 Nodes * Johannesburg, South Africa +27-11-476-2008 * Best BBS * Best Sysop * @digitec.co.za * RsaNET User Choice Awards 1993 *