Re: Development tools: where to? (Long)

I have followed a similar path, except substitute Notes/Domino development for EGL (EGL wasn't out at the time). Notes development is pretty nice, if you can learn the quirks and terminology of Notes. The problem was with LEI - the integration to Informix. At the time I tried, it didn't work well or scale. I had Domino on Linux and LEI was newly available for Linux. Informix connection was not well supported. That may have changed by now. We are trying a .Net framework for building smart client applications called IdeaBlade (www.ideablade.com). It doesn't run on Linux, but it has worked with Informix (on Linux) so far. It can do off-line caching, business object server caching, etc. They seem to be a great company to work with, too. We'll see. I go for training in late October. I need to have significant progress on my application before the end of the year. If they can do that, I'll sing their praises. BTW - Visual Studio .Net isn't a terrible IDE. They are behind some of the Java IDEs on some features, but ahead in others. And the newest version is due out in a few months. Aside - Look at the other data access frameworks for .Net (free or otherwise). I haven't found one that claims Informix support.