Re: HELP: Please help, what client-tool to use for developing client-server applications?

Savas Pavlidis wrote:
>
> Prior of buying, and most of all dedicated to one client tool for
> developing client-server applications, I would like the comments of
> users who already have the experience of more than one to make a
> comparison among them.
>
> In my company we are thinking of moving from our COBOL legacy system
> to client-server. Observed several rdbms, and settled to Oracle or
> Sybase, because they have good support here in Greece. The problem
> aroused for the tools. Oracle wants to use their products
> (developer2000 and designer2000) which seems good at spec, but we have
> heard numerous things for them (they GPF, they are heavy, they are
> slow etc) but one main thing that made us give a second thought, it
> was their price, which is very expensive (at least here in Greece,
> where salaries are too slow compared to US for example). On the other
> end, Sybase moves its Powerbuilder, for which I heard also same things
> as an immature product too, and slow. In usenet several users propose
> other products (Delphi, Jam etc) which makes the situtation even worse
> for us to decide. We are only two (2) developers, and our budget is
> low, so we can't afford the money and most of all the time, to test
> every possible platform (or even some of them) before we decide. And
> because the time invested on one tool, plus the money for education on
> this would be too much to later abandon,
>
> WE WOULD LIKE YOUR OPINIONS PLEASE !!!!!
>
> We seek the opinions of developers who tried more than one of the
> products (Developer2000/Designer2000, Powerbuilder/S-Designor, Delphi2
> C/S, VisualBasic, Jam etc ) and can give their opinions. Some notes of
> the strengths of their preferred tool that is not available on others
> is highly prefered.
> Also sites with documents which compare various tools would be
> helpful.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Please reply also by e-mail, because I may miss the post, due to IBM
> which has a lot of problems with it's news servers the last year.
>
> Savas Pavlidis
>
> pavlidis_at_ibm.netWhile I can agree so far what Joe Palm and Gene are recommending, I
think several important topics are not discussed yet. These topics include:
the numbers of users and transactions,
the overall size of the C/S project,
distribution (one or several db servers), network capabilities,
needs for scalability, availability,
preferred server platforms (UNIX, NT, others), legacy integration (non, partial, full), reuse of the cobol app
etc. (random order).

Several of these topics influence the design/architecture of your future C/S system. For example: a normally good performing front end app. can be seriously slowed down by having too many user connections to the dbms when going 2-tier or by weak network throughput.

-- 
Best regards
Rainer Leicht, NCR (Switzerland)

Email: rainer.leicht_at_switzerland.NCR.com