Re: SUMMARY OF COMPARISONS ON CLIENTS FOR CLIENT-SERVER (LONG)

In article <2ug7nc$ji3_at_tiete.dcc.unicamp.br> bill_at_tiete.dcc.unicamp.br (Bill Coutinho) writes:

>2 weeks late, here is the summary of comparisons on many clients for SQL
>client-server. Please, e-mail comments to this summary to me. I'll send
>a second-round summary to all of you, but only 1 week late :-).

I just saw a very impressive demo of a new IBM product called Visual Age. It claims to be a fully object oriented, scalable, cross platform application developer. I'll post a few highlights:

Fully object oriented: Visual age is based on Smalltalk (Smalltalk is its scripting language). You build parts by connecting together parts and/or writing Smalltalk code. Business logic parts can be constructed and viewed at the same level as UI parts. It supports the System Object Model (SOM), with DSOM (distributed SOM) promised. Because it is based on Smalltalk, it is also very interactive - you can alter a class while it is actually running and see the results immediately! You can also examine ancestor classes of a class while the class is open (one of my major gripes with PB).

Visual programming: Applications and parts can be built by visually joining together objects. This lowers the lower curve significantly, and means that you can have application builders who just join parts, and more specialized part builders who write Smalltalk code. It also means a lot less coding is needed compared to say PB.

Team development: Version and release control of classes and applications, including requisite support. There is a central repository, and a configuration map for each developer specifying which version of the classes he/she is working on.

Client server support: Visual age supports a variety of comms protocols and RDBMS's

My criticisms of the product are:

Slow.

Resource hungry (OS/2 based currently with Windows promised Q4 '94) - needing 16MB minimum. Deployment can be done in 8Mb, though.

Expensive (no exact figures, but I gathered it would cost more than PB).

I worry about clarity of programming visually, with lines flying about the place. The IBMers said that with good modularity this is not a problem.

As far as I'm concerned the benefits I've seen far outweigh the disadvantages.

N.T.Cheung Received on Wed Jun 29 1994 - 09:36:07 CEST