Re: New-Era, how good is it?

In <Pine.ULT.3.91.950623223321.16099A-100000@rac6.wam.umd.edu> Pietrykowski <linmarie@wam.umd.edu> writes: > > > >On 23 Jun 1995 Nils.Myklebust@CCMAIL.telemax.no wrote: > >>Everything deleted. I know people hate it when you include the whole >message. > >Yes, Mircosoft made a lot of money on VB. But then again they were >giving it away for almost nothing. I don't think Informix can afford to >do that. Don't get me wrong Informix needs to do something. Now what >that something is, is a different story. > Well having worked for 3 years previously with Uniface I believe there definitely is money in the tool market you just need to know how to get at it. Up till the first quarter of 94 Uniface was doing quite well thank you very much! However, Uniface was derailed for (in my opinion) quite a few reasons. Of course a buy out, mass exodus of their US employees and a weak first release of version 6 caused some major problems but even before these issues occured there were other problems which I believe where even more insidious problems that Uniface never delt with. These problems where the cost of the product and how to deal with the low end of the market. Because Uniface never really delt with these issues (i.e. they remained an expencive tool and just walked away from the low end of the market) they became, in my opinion, a nitch player in the tool market which is a very dangerous game to play as the high end of the market today will be the low end of the market in the not so distant future. >I have looked at a lot of tools: Powerbuilder, SQL for Windows, Delphi, >Jam6, Uniface, and of course NewEra. NewEra would be my choice to use if >I could get it to work under OS/2. I was really impressed with the >4gl++. NewEra had a lot of power that you don't have in other tools. > >I want your opinion on something. I think you should pick the tool >depending on what data base you are using. If you are using Informix you >should use NewEra. If you are going to use Sybase, the you should go >with Powerbuilder. If you are going with a PC based data base, I would >go with Delphi. Do you think you should use the tool that goes along >with the Data Base? Definitely not! I believe that in the past that this was true (i.e. you should use ingres 4gl for ingres, informix's 4gl for informix etc.) but the rules are changing (thank you very much ODBC). If you are going to base your entire business around a particular technology you MAY want to consider this approach however these days the market changes so fast that I feel it is very risk to bet the farm on ANY particular database or for that matter any particular software technology (remember Ingres). This lack of trust is part of my fascination with NewEra. If the 4gl tool where to die for any particular reason I can still generate C++ code and THAT is a rather large herd to be moving with and I feel pretty comfortable with the fact that there will be some rather large on ramps to wherever I want to go from there. Frank Tarzanin