50 replies to this topic

[Rob Fantini]

Neil.
Thanks for the response.

I'm unclear on: 'Granted if you are developing green screen apps then speed of development is the only advantage '...

If only Green Screen, which development system is fastest?

Rob

[Rob Donovan]

Please do not take this the wrong way, we all appreciate your participance in this forum. I get people telling me that this site has problems sometimes and I listen to what they say and improve on it. It's the only way to get something right, listen to the users, they are the ones using it. Just because 'I' think something is good does not mean that the rest of the 'group' thinks its good.

I have used Developer Studio.

Client: 208
Kernel: 218
Dev St: 24x
OS : Windows 2000 & 98

'Because it works is no a forwarding thinking buisness case' - Well personally I think its a great way to think. If it works it will help my business, if it fails then so will I.

'over 50% of world wide users use Developer Studio'.... are you sure they are actually using it?

'First Real use of GUI', hasn't DS been around since at least 1997?

'Why use something that is not supported',Are you saying that @MOD & PRO-AIDE are unsupported...

If so, I better talk to my company about it as they are paying maintenance on these products and will not be happy they are unsupported.

Developer Studio does nothing much more than PRO-AIDE and I'm sure that most people have their own utils for doing the other things.

The reason PRO-AIDE reduces dev. time is the paging format for LSs and the renumbering of flds etc.

I had not tried DS for some time so I gave it another go and after 2 hours came up with this.....

Personally, I don't like the graphics or layout of fields and buttons, but maybe its just me.

If you have 'Single Click' enabled in the PIV, double clicking on the 'DS' icon in @MAIN tries to create a function named '3'

Too many windows are popping up and it is impossible to navigate with the keyboard. Windows accelerator keys are not used so you have to 'click' with the mouse. Using the mouse is slooowww.

Randomly, the 'Modify' and 'Characteristics' buttons do nothing when you click on them. you have to exit the function and come back in (even if you have an LS selected).

Randomly, when you click on the 'Function Keys' button it says 'FUNCTION KEYS ONLY APPLY TO SCREEN FUNCTIONS', and the function IS a screen function.

If you have LS 1 (flds 1-6) & LS 2(flds 5-6) and delete field 5, LS 2 has a start field of 0, and LS 1 says it is a parent of LS 2.

If you have LS 1 and LS2 and insert 2 LSs (i.e. press 2 and ctrl F5) between LS 1 & 2 the Function Key defs are lost.

If you have LU 1 & 2 and insert 2 LUs in between them (i.e. press 2 and ctrl f5) then the original LU 2 has a start & end LU of 5, when it should be 4.

The 'Control Break' button in Update functions does nothing.

Field validation is poor, example: you can enter 'S' as a sort type in a Update.

Could not find a way to edit logic '0' for DEFINE statements, the logic ID said I must enter 1-255.

I switched to 'Forms Designer' as my editor. If you click on 'Green Screen' tab in the fields properties the client gets a windows error and you have to reboot windows to get the client to start again.

Developer Studio is actually slower than PRO-AIDE and has no advantages.

Finding these problems in just 2 hours does not make me think that I could ever give it to the development team that I work with, it would cause to many problems and if I find this many problems, I'm guessing a largish development team would find more. Our customer would not be happy.

A GUI editor is needed, but it needs to be fast, drag-and-drop and well laid out.

Also, you have to face it, a lot of companies haven't or will not move to GUI, and it is very impracticable to develop functions in a GUI env. when writing a green screen system.

This is not only my view, the majority of people at the site I work at also share this view.

Rob Donovan

[Rob Atherton]

Yes, I have used Dev. Studio and there is little if anything that would persuade me to use it over Pro-Aide.

Some of the utilities are useful but most of us have or could easily write similar ones in a short space of time (as long as we have the defs. for FILEHDR etc). Studio (or any other development tool) should be judged on it development capabilities and not the add-ons.

The screen painter was a step in the right direction for laying out screens and re-ordering fields but it was very unstable and was also known to corrupt functions.

I would imagine that the majority of developers are fairly quick using a keyboard so the introduction of 'point and click' features will slow down development time not speed it up.

It would interesting to hear from some of the 50% of surveyed users who use Developer Studio as to their opinions of it. They use it every day so would be the best judges of it.

[Dan Shannon]

Hi Rob

Forgive me for being weird, but point and click *can* occasionally enhance the development environment - so long as it gives you an advantage over the EOD/Window/Cancel hegemony.

Dan Shannon

PS Can't believe I managed to work the word 'hegemony' into a post! Someone please tell me I used it wrong?

[Shaun Rudland]

G'Day Dan,

According to my dictionary, it means leadership. I'm not sure that really fits, but let me extend my finest contrafibulations on your attempt to educate the rest of us rabble.

Regards

Shaun

[Dan Shannon]

Oops, thought it meant dominant (usu. negative sense) ideology. Will bang head on wall a suitable number of times.

[DARREN]

I have read with great interest all the points made in the discussion threads regarding both the Bootstraps and the @MODX development tool and related topics. The debates have been candid and there has been a good exchange of ideas and information (which is what this site is all about). Out of all these discussions, one would hope that a little common sense would prevail and it is for this reason I have responded to this topic.

I think it is generally recognized that for all its strengths, in order for ProIV (the programming language) to progress and grow, it must attract the kids leaving the schools and universities and embrace the windows and e-commerce environments that will be all but a defacto standard in five to ten years time. I do not think anyone can honestly say that this can be achieved through the employment of a ‘green screen’ development environment, especially in the light of the competition VB, Delphi, Magic etc. In order to achieve this ProIV (the company) has to progress its development environment forward. It is therefore not a question of whether Developer Studio is better than Pro-Aide, as the argument is academic.

One would also therefore recognize that it is better to have one development environment, common to everybody, rather than exposing the ‘sacred’ bootstraps allowing for the development of ‘one of a kind - custom built’ environments. The development skills cross-over, maintenance and support overheads of the latter speak for themselves.

There is a saying that if you are standing still you are actually moving backward and just because something is working it does not mean that it cannot be improved. It is for this reason that ProIV is changing. It has to.

We (ProIV and the ProIV community) have an opportunity to shape this change. The new development environment is under construction and the old ones will eventually go away. Now is the time to let ProIV (Neil and the ProIV development team) know what you as developers want in it. Alternatively, you can whine about it and do nothing.

[Rob Atherton]

Hi Dan,

I can forgive your self-confessed weirdness for the 'point and click' opinion but there is no excuse for using words like hegemony.

[Mike Nicholson]

I don't really think anybody has been whining particularly about the development environments - most people currently use something that they are reasonably happy with. We use ProAide on our site and I find it pretty easy to work with. There are a few little quirks which I curse occasionally but in general it makes my life easier than using @MOD or @MODX.

I personally would have no objection to using a gui development environment *provided* that I could navigate it simply and quickly using the keyboard, preferably using screens I am at at least vaguely familiar with. The main advantage it would have for me over existing development environments would be a decent gui screen painter with full text/field drag and drop capabilities.

I understand the reasons behind wanting a common development language but I still haven't seen any decent argument for not putting the boostraps into public domain.

AS far as attracting new coders straight from university - sorry, but I don't think that's ever going to happen on a large scale. ProIV had it's chance to be flavour of the minute and didn't quite make it - this is not intended as a criticism, merely a statement of fact. There will never be the same demand for ProIV as we currently have for langauges like Java.

All I'm hoping to get out of this thread is for ProIV to pay attention to a few of the things people say and consider them while the new release is being written.

Cheers

Mike

[Dan Shannon]

'One would also therefore recognize that it is better to have one development environment...'

No one wouldn't. Are you really claiming that Java should only have a single development tool? Or 'C'?

If you want to make big strides in improving a tool, you're better doing it against a healthy background of competing tools rather than in a vacuum. So if you want to attract the 'kids', foster the ability for the geeks out here to compete by writing better tools than you. Give us all the bootstraps, let the hordes (I'll refrain from using the words 'infinite number of monkeys' - but the same idea about producing great works holds) of developers out here have a go and see if we can't come up with something better than PRO-AIDE or Studio. If it makes the language easier to use, then everybody wins again. But if you at PRO-IV all keep taking the blinkered (and frankly a little arrogant) attitude that you know what's best for us, and we'll like what tools we're given from on high, then eventually we'll all take our ball and go home.

Finally, I really do wish that PRO-IV wouldn't come up with a brand new design for the most fabulous development tool ever every five minutes. Mostly they're buggy for ages, often they're half baked, sometimes they never see the light of day (anyone actually SEEN JADE yet?). Please just pick one and make it better for a while.

Once again - publish the bootstraps freely, make all our lives a little easier - and we'll all be very happy.

Until the next time

Dan Shannon

[Rob Donovan]

No one is 'whining'. Most of the posts on this subject relate to real problems that could arise.

We have ALL had to put up with multiple bad development environments for many years now.

What I think people are saying is not that we don’t want a new environment, but what the quality of the new environment will be like.

Because of the past and the problems with the stability of PROIV, don't you think that we are all a little wary about another 'new' environment.

Going by the past, its not going to be good!!

If you have and chance of getting 'new' people into PRO-IV you MUST make things more stable, kernel & client, not only to make it 'flash'.

Visual Basic, C and Java all have multiple development environments. One environment cannot and will not please everyone. We all expect different things.

What is wrong with allowing other people/companies developing their own systems?

Rob Donovan

[Steve Jenkins]

Most of us would agree you would have to be backward not to look forward. We also undertand that you don't re-invent yourself you will wither and die.

However, our past experiences of Pro-IV do not fill us with confidence. The reason we are reluctant to embrace the future is we know all the quirks in the current versions and we live with them ('cos you don't fix them). We are too scared to embrace new versions of Proi-IV because it will have bugs and you will take ages to fix them (if at all). It's almost impossible to code 100% error free but your speed of response to bugs must also be first class. This way developers can get theit teeth into new versions safe in the knowledge that if they find problems they will soon be remedied.

I'm sure the majority of us are encouraged by your steps to improve the language. However, when you release this sparkling new beast on us 'one would hope that a little common sense would prevail'. It must work, it must be easy to use and finally, what does VIP stand for?

Is it Vaguely Intelligent Programming? :-)

Cheers

Steve