24 replies to this topic

[Mike Wright]

Do you mean the thing they were going to give away with a magazine?

I heard about that a couple of months or so ago - but nothing since.

Either way - it won't be in the magazines I read !

[Ross Bevin]

I attended the Pro-IV Executive Users Group Meeting at Lake Tahoe in March where this strategy was announced. The Single Development License (SDL) will be a free product; the stratgey being that more Pro-IV licenses will be sold if we have more pro-IV developers. The techs at the time were still working on the method to use to bundle all the peices required. They know they need to make the install more seemless. The release date is meant to be April/May.

As a side issue, we as a group were invited to present to Northgate a Pro-IV feature wish list of 10 items. The number one item we voted on was an interactive debugger for Pro-IV, similar to the one developed for (A.L.L). There was some debate at the meeting that for a release of a free SDL to be successful a debugger needed to be available. If you are trying to attract new developers they need to have the same debugging tools they are use to having with other development languages. Nothgate could choose to delay the SDL release until a debugger is developed. They didn't say this, it is just my assumption.

I would like to add one more thing before I sign off. I have been a developer of Pro-IV since 1986 and I must say I have never felt more comfortable than I do now with the current ownership and direction of the Pro-IV language. Northgate is committed to enhancing Pro-IV and ensuring it remains a viable development platform. They still have a ways to go, and they know it.

[Tony Waszkiewicz]

I think that this was also announced by Richard Gooding last year in June(?) at the European Pro-IV Executive Users Group Meeting. It was suggested that it was aimed at linux developers and would be on the cover of some linux mags, but we pointed out a few weaknesses in that approach, e.g;
Windows is required to run the client - how good would it sound to linux devotees
The install was not very good, needed more help = a wizard
A debugger was needed for comparison with other languages and to help the learning curve.

Mention was made that proiv were working on a tutorial.

The logical extension of a free single developer is that all developer licences are free, so whay are proiv still charging <_<

regards

[Joseph Bove]

Tony,

That is a good point about the Linux and needing a windows client - unless they were able to bundle the Web client in with it. This might be a bit too many moving pieces though for the intended user base.

Side Question: Does VIP work in the Web Client?

Personally, I hope that they start rolling out free VIP's soon. Anything that creates a positive interest in ProIV is beneficial to us a VAR.

Regards,

Joseph

[Phil]

For someone who hasn't seen the VIP development tool - can anyone explain what it looks like and how it operates ?

[Mike Wright]

Phil,

After using Developer Studio for a few years, VIP really is a great tool. It's very GUI oriented, with loads of icons, clicky stuff, y'know... We love the ability to quickly copy and paste LS's or fragments of functions.

OK it's got a few irritating points - but, to be fair to Pro-IV, they seem to be slowly ironing out the wrinkles and adding new features.

From a development point of view it's much faster and easier than Dev Studio, and that's all that really matters to us.

And, no, I'm not on commission.

Mike

Edited by Mike Wright, 15 April 2004 - 09:21 AM.

[Rob Donovan]

Hi,

I find it uses excessive resources from the host machine and is slow and cluncky to use. Its sometimes hard to figure out how to do things.

I dont like the graphics or layout either.

It takes me much more time to develop a function in VIP than it does in ProAide or alike function editors.

Yes you can cut & paste, and that is a help... but it could have been done so much better. It needs to be more like windows, so that it is easy / obvious how to use it... since most people know the windows way of doing things.

Using the 'screen painter' is not nice either, since it starts up another external application that is not written in ProIV, and therfor does not opperate like the rest of VIP.

Its a shame that the whole thing was not written in VB or Visual C.

Rob D.

[Mike Wright]

Hey Rob,

Some fair points, but I can't agree with you about the screen painter.

Forms designer never really worked in the pre-V5 days, and we missed it like hell. It works fine now, and having the abililty to move/copy large parts of static and dynamic data around the screen is fantastic.

I know it's a different application, and thus has to load the function in and out which takes a few seconds - but surely the functionality of the tool outweights this minor problem.

For me at least, the screen painter is the best and most functional part of VIP when designing new screens.

I agree with you that it's sometimes hard to figure out how to do things Rob, it's not always intuitive and the GUI icons aren't too obvious.

My point is though - VIP isn't perfect by a long way, but it's the best tool around for us at the moment (until yours comes along that is). Speed of development is imperative, so I guess we go with what we're comfortable with.

Mike

Edited by Mike Wright, 15 April 2004 - 10:17 AM.

[Rob Donovan]

Hi,

I think it should have all been done like the screen painter, then it would be much better.

I can certainly see your point about having to use VIP, ProIV LTD have not left the world much of a choice....

Mine is coming along, but its alot work for a single person

I've recently given out an Alpha version to a few people and hope to get some feedback soon. But I still have quite a bit to go yet. But I think I can keep going for ever!!!

I've got the underlying functionality stable now and all the difficult bits like Drag & Droping LSs, Fields within and between functions, and the Undo/Redo bits are done.. But its lacking in 'new' features.

I'm now working on the 'Screen Painter', files & Global Logics bits and a few utilities like Lists, Regens, Compares, Search / Repleace, Spell Check functions.

Nothings looking too complicated at the moment (heard than one before in IT ), so I should get them done relatively quickly.

Rob.

[Tony Waszkiewicz]

hi Mike,

You said "From a development point of view it's much faster and easier than Dev Studio".

I would be very interested on your take on this having heard several different figures mentioned, so how much faster have you found it to be and how much time does your average developer need to get back to the same speed as DS?

Rob,
I would agree "that it's a lot of work for one person" and I think this is would be one of the major problems in going for your IDE. VIP has been available for a while now and is continually enhanced. Also how will you be ale to keep up when they launch v6 and integrate who knows what?

regards

Edited by Tony Waszkiewicz, 15 April 2004 - 11:00 AM.

[Rob Donovan]

Hi Tony,

The hardest parts were getting the basic structure and storage of functions on the PC side, and a fast way to get at the information and get it back to ProIV. Now I have my 'Undo/Redo' structure of holding changes made to a function (file, or global logic) sorted out, I think I'm past the horrible bits.

Therefor adding utils etc is relavitly easy now.

I cant see what they could add in 6.0, that could affect me too much, but I will be talking to ProIV about things such are that.

The worst thing would be if they got rid of the Native bootstraps (which I know they are talking about). This mean I would have to use the VIP bootstraps, and the data is not stored well for fast retrival from those files .. However, it should not slow down things too much.

Rob D.

[Rob Donovan]

Oh, and...

I've heard VIP is 'supposed' to be 30% faster to develop in... but I really can not see how that was calculated.

And thats not what I get using it...

Rob D.

[Mike Wright]

Hi Tony,

Going from DS to VIP - I seem to remember the first few days being completely disorienting, but it was only a few weeks before we got back up to the speed of developing we were used to with DS.

After a couple of months, once we were really comfortable with VIP, we were much quicker.

The key for us was getting to grips with the new features that didn't exist in DS - things like fragment management, new funky logic editor, working screen painter (hee hee) and quick duplication/editing of existing LS's, etc.

I used DS recently on a test box, and was just amazed at what it couldn't do compared to VIP. Well ... they say you can't go back !

HTH

Mike