Re: Can we solve this -- NFNF and non-1NF at Loggerheads

<lauri.pietarinen_at_atbusiness.com> wrote in message news:1107888779.257397.229830_at_l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> David Cressey wrote:
>>
>> Eventually, Datatrieve was extended to work with data in databases
> like VAX
>> DBMS, VAX RDB/VMS, and through the SNA gateway, on data residing on
> an IBM
>> mainframe.
>>
>> Unfortunately, Datatrieve got a horrible reputaion for resource
> wasting
>> among "real programmers". Some of that was deserved. But on
> balance, I'd
>> say that the real programmers misunderestimated Datatrieve very
> badly. It
>> was no substitute for a real DBMS, but it sure was handy!
>>
>
> I think we have a mind-body problem here. We are thinking of the
> DB and app. environment separately when only they together can create
> an application.

Yes -- agreed!

> Many 4GL languages were very popular and successful (among others
> Telon comes to mind),
> because they were built with the whole environment in mind. SQL-DMBSes
> overtook them and we lost the tight integration between DBMS and
> application.

It did make sense to loosely couple database services and application code to some extent, but lines were/are not usually drawn in the most helpful ways.

> SQL-DBMSes are app. environment neutral, which is of course a good
> thing, but
> we are losing in productivity.

Agreed.

> In my opinion J2EE has set us back 20
> years.

More agreement from me on that, although I'm still hopeful that Java can be part of a solution to get us back to flexible, maintainable, scalable, reliable, secure, and productive application development even with a distributed platform (compared to a single-server-centric model). EJB containers are not what will get us there, however (I'm about to try out Java Server Faces with tomcat, using NetBeans 4.1 -- we shall see ...) Cheers! --dawn

> regards,
> Lauri Pieatrinen
>
Received on Wed Feb 09 2005 - 00:33:03 CET