Your opinions on JAM

Subject: Your experience with JAM

Posted to:      comp.databases
                comp.client-server
                comp.databases.oracle
                comp.databases.sybase

We haved been evaluating potential front-end development tools for a new client/server medical records application being developed using the Oracle RDBMS.

Today I attended a sales presentation on JAM from JYACC, Inc. along with our project's DBA. While we'll share responsibility for client application programming, we have very different backgrounds in this area. Debbie, our DBA, has extensive background in Oracle and Oracle tools including SQL*Forms. My programming experience has been in non-SQL DBMSs including Clipper, which I've really appreciated for its flexibility, extensibility, and wealth of 3rd-party add-ons (including interfaces to Oracle).

I think it's fair to say that each of us was impressed by the demonstration, albeit from different perspectives. The JYACC sales rep was pretty knowledgable and fielded a wide variety of questions well. The product looks extremely flexible, both in terms of the platforms supported and in the ability to move applications between them. Prototyping on the fly, strong data type extensions and dictionary capabilities, etc.

I've seen a few posts on Usenet regarding JAM, but would *REALLY* appreciate obtaining additional comments and opinions on some specific questions/topics. If you'd reply by E-Mail, I could abstract/summarize and re-post to the above newsgroups (or others you might suggest).

The areas/questions of interest include:

1. It would be great to be able to develop for SQL and non-SQL applications with a single tool, but JAM does not offer an interface to xBASE (or other file server-based) file formats and indexes. Does any 3rd party vendor offer this? Would it be feasible to hack a C product like CodeBase to achieve this?
2. Is there a 3rd party or significant public domain activity related to JAM?
3. JAM is extensible in C, but includes its own procedural language (which I assume is pre-processed to C). What do you think of the JAM procedural language as compared to other high/low-level tools like Clipper?
4. JAM supposedly has a new add-on that allows interfacing with 3270 emulation. Anyone worked with this or rolled their own SNA capabilities?
5. When developing, can you run multiple instances of JAM on one machine? Say, the Windows version under OS/2. We'd like to move to the OS/2 PM version when/if released. Meanwhile, can anyone offer their experience in running the Windows version (and the MS C compiler) under OS/2 2.x?

Any other general comments on JAM? Support? Their track record in delivering promised upgrades (such as the Mac/PM/NT versions promised for late '93]?

How easy is it to maintain complex applications and maintain version control in multi-developer situations? How does JAM compare to other tools you've used? What were they?

Will JAM support BC++ for OS/2? Received on Sun Mar 14 1993 - 00:50:43 CET