Re: NewEra to exploit Universal Server (fwd)

John Gose <gose_jo@leg.wa.gov> wrote: :What about OCX or related technologies?? Even though they are not really :cross platform, neither is 3.0. I believe that OCXs provide what :Informix is still trying to find. If Informix wants to sell into the :developers market, then they will have to provide that sort of :functionallity for accessing their database. Or they will end up with a :propriatary solution which no one will purchase because there is no third :party support for it. NewEra, for all of the wishes of Informix, is a :small blip on the line of development tools market. If Informix was :really thinking ahead, they would release a complete set of tools for use :by any third party product. In other words, get out of the development :market (where NewEra is mediocre at best) and into the tools/applet :market where they provide access methods to the thing they do best, :databases. This is a good idea, and Informix is doing something about it. At the conference they announced a java class library to be released with Universel Server to access all it's functionality. It will be something you use instead of JDBC, as JDBC is based on ODBC (in the sense that it works in a similar way and has similar functions) and this is far from enough for full access to Universal Server. Of course they should also work with Microsoft and others to extend ODBC and with Sun and others to extend JDBC. To what extent they are doing this I don't know. As I understood Stonebreaker they will also release ActiveX controls (previously called OCX) for the purpose of handling special datatypes you can have in Universal Server. These will be directly supported by NewEra. We can only hope they will also be usefull in other languages. These announcements where only made by speakers. There is no documents describing them that I know of. That I see as a *major* problem right now. Informix is holding a loot of information about what they are doing very thightly. It is overdue that they write up a set of white- papers on what they are going to do in the tools area. Do you hear this Informix? Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company