19 replies to this topic

[Rob Donovan]

Hi,

ProIV LTD have just announced that they will not be supporting Native ProIV after September next year!!!

http://www.proiv.com..._sp_p4peol.html

You will be forced to convert to VIP and use that.

Rob D.

[Tony Waszkiewicz]

Hi all,

The policy for some time has been that new features will only be supported in VIP.

It's worth taking a look at this link to see all the End of Lifes.
For example;
Developer Studio is 30 June 2004
Windows NT (4) has already been EOL'd.

regards

[Jeff Hon]

I'm quite amazed at PRO-IV Ltd's attempt to destroy itself by isolating its customer base. Successful companies succeed by listening to and working with their customers...you'd think. Brilliant move PRO-IV Ltd.

[Cleve Haynes]

Lets be objective about this.

The reality is that @MOD & @MODX suck and always have. It's no great loss (unless you have nothing else and are unwilling to use VIP!! You never know, Rob might rescue you with his IDE... )

ProIV made the mistake years ago of never improving the tools that had things going for them - such as Pro-Aide or Superlayer.... If only superlayer had been improved to write directly to the native boots...

Companies make end of life statements all the time - they have to otherwise their business will stay in 1990 forever...

At least ProIV are trying to move forward. They know that the product will die eventually unless they can attract new business. Let's be fair here - they aren't going to attract new business with @MOD as the drawcard...

Cleve

[Ross Bevin]

I would assume that Pro-IV Inc does not have vast development resources at it's disposal, so I can understand their desire to end support on older technologies so they can focus on the new. Every major software company operates this way. With this announcement Pro-IV is taking a gamble that VIP will retain and attract new customers.

I am an old diehard Native developer myself, but I learnt a valuable lesson two months ago after training 2 of our non Pro-IV developers, in Native. These guys were Visual Basic and .NET developers and they found it very difficult trying to learn the concepts of Pro-IV in a Native environment. At the end of the course I showed them a quick demo of VIP. There overwhelming response was why are we still using Native when VIP is available. These guys have refused to use Native until we migrate to VIP or some other GUI development environment, and I can't say I blame them. Pro-IV Inc will not attract young developers unless they focus on VIP or some other GUI tool. They can not survive on us old developers alone. They need to attract new blood.

So, why is it that as developers we push and push Pro-IV Inc to give us the tools to develop GUI applications, but we refuse to use a GUI development application ourselves? On my part I have been waiting for Neil Mellis to provide me with the means to manipulate the VIP bootstrap files like I do now to Native. I have received assurances from Deep Ghosh that these will be in place by December.

Rob, I know you are a busy guy but when are you going to release a working copy of Pro-IV IDE? For my part I would be happy if you and Neil got together and came up with one great GUI tool. IDE has the advantage of working directly with the Native bootstrap files while VIP has the advantage of support.

[Ross Bevin]

In your case just pick a release of Pro-IV Native that is stable and you are happy with, and stay on it forever.

[Rob Donovan]

Rob, I know you are a busy guy but when are you going to release a working copy of Pro-IV IDE? For my part I would be happy if you and Neil got together and came up with one great GUI tool. IDE has the advantage of working directly with the Native bootstrap files while VIP has the advantage of support.

I'm typing as fast as I can

ProIV / Neil have shown very little / no interest in my function editor at the moment...

It would have been nice to have some sort of support from them.

As for the EOL notice... I can understand that they need to move forward, but so many companies are still using Native that it is simply stupid to cut them all off like this

Personally, I dont think you will even be able to attract new developers with ProIV and VIP, when there are things like VB, C and Java around.

Looking after the customer base you have should be a priority.

Rob D.

[Lewis Mccabe]

We have been using PRO-IV since 1985. We jumped on Superlayer when it came out to get AWAY from native. Our functions in native were a maintenance nightmare. 30-40 LS's in native simply did not cut it - not if we wanted to make a profit. SL gave us the ability to manage and enhance our large functions but forced us into its screen flow and design. We developed thousands of functions in SL. A year ago we took a look at VIP and converted one of our vertical apps to it.

We are familiar with general IDE products. We also develop in VB and Cold Fusion. We know you guys would like a true IDE for PRO-IV. Is VIP much better than native and SL? Without question. What VIP has done is allow us to take code we have developed over 18 years, in two different development environments and continue to make money from it. How many languages can say that?

Why do so many of you refuse to go to VIP? Have you taken an honest look at the product? You can take a native function and simply open it in VIP. Its feature set is actually quite good as well. Is it on par with Java/Jbuilder, VB, etc? Of course not. Are we happy with it? Yes. In fact, you might be surprised, we are happy with their support of it as well. On the most recent release, we found a bug in the logic editor. Mike Monsef emailed a patch to us the next day.

We have spoken to a number of PRO-IV VARS who are hesitant to make the move to VIP. They have many utilities written in native which they pump their code through to create their deliverables. This is a show stopper for some.

Our prospective is purely a business one. One of our competitors had to rewrite their product from scratch. They failed twice, almost went under, got bought out by a VC and are now forcing their customer base to move to their new feature weak Windows product. It has opened the door for us very wide.

VIP is pretty stable now and PRO-IV appears to be dedicated to it.

If you are summarily saying no to VIP, take another look at it. You might be surprised.

Lew McCabe

[Brian Manners]

Looks like we'll HAVE too

[Surajit]

Well, for me as I have used Native as I started, then Superlayer and currently use Glovia Superlayer (Glovia has its own way in developing) and I have also used Developer Studio and try with VIP.

Native : Like Assembler, you have to do everything by yourself
Superlayer : Compare with Native, it is 3rd GL language, more comfortable, near object oriented tool
Developer Studio : 1st GUI tool in Pro IV, fully compatitble with Native and with new useful features
VIP : The 2nd version of GUI tool, object oriented tool, VB, .NET features

I think that many of you are old Pro IV green screen developer and feel like me that coding in GUI give you a lot more task to do since there are more logic to code. But when consider about modular, template, project, check in, check out features, etc. in VIP, these give us a lot of handy tools in developing a complex function and application.

I strongly agree wtih Ross that Pro IV have to make a new GUI tool to attract new blood developer to stay in business. It can stay on only green screen or mainframe platform.

[Surajit]

Err, my last sentence I mistype 'cannot' to 'can' , so it means 'It cannot stay on only green screen or mainframe platform.'