63 replies to this topic

[Tyrone Hopes]

[quote name='Guest' date='15 Apr 2005, 08:16']And there is an answer coming to all this.

  A complete development environment which is managed code, follows windows standard, blazing fast, has everybodys wish lists and will give the RAD productivity back to PROIV.

  Watch this space.[/quote]
[QUOTE]
I hope and pray that it's better than VIP.

In the meantime, I've found an excellent 'feature' in VIP. Clicking randomly, I came across this window:

This is the famous 'morph' window. It allows you to change an object from Selection Cycle (for example) to Many Time Paging Screen Cycle. But where's the 'OK' or 'Cancel' buttons? There are none! If you press the top right hand 'close' you get the usual 'Window Close not Allowed' error

(I keep on hoping that one of these windows will allow it!)
So how do you exit? By double clicking the item it already is! Keep that mouse steady as you click, chaps, otherwise you do irretrievable damage to your function, and you have to import again (like I had to!).

Sterling work.

[Dan Shannon]

Blimey

And to think that I missed out on all of this. Neil Mellis must be seething.

VIP is lovely, Rob's IDE is lovely. For that matter, @MODX is lovely if only because it still works.

Java is better (and so is .Net, before the flame-wars start) because it really is, well, better, now.

Get out, while the getting's good. PRO-IV's core is old, it's time to get you and your business away from it, just like it was time to run away from COBOL and/or assembler (for most businesses) 5-10 years ago. This is not a change from the arguments around SuperLayer, when it came out (it was the salvation of PRO-IV, lest we forget) or Studio (it was the salvation of PRO-IV, lest we forget), or VIP (it was the salvation of PRO-IV, lest we forget), or Rob's IDE (it will be the salvation of PRO-IV, lest we forget). The problem, in the end, is not about a development tool, it's about a language that never quite could manage to grow up. Now we all have lots of investment in it, some of us have spent 20+ years of our working lives in PRO-IV, but it really is time to start looking at the alternatives.

Large(ish) companies like the one I work for have enormous capital tied up in PRO-IV, but the cost of a shift is (in my opinion) less onerous than it once was - and the benefits can be huge! No more legacy database (we converted from PRO-ISAM), no more confusion of presentation logic with business logic, no more reliance on piss-poor implementation of SQL (I want type 2 SQL, why won't the kernel just bloody handle it???) Want to use distributed applications architecture (SOA, ESB, WS-* if you want acronyms) - go ahead! But not with PRO-IV (not really - you can - but it's a band-aid approach at best).

I've spent some of my time in the last 2 years building J2EE applications and it's becoming remarkable what's actually possible using some of the Open Source frameworks out there - like PRO-IV's abstraction of the data access (file definitions do it for you)? Try Hibernate. Can't be bothered doing transaction handling code (PRO-IV does it implicitly) - it's all there in Spring. Want to enforce relational integrity in your lovely RDBMS? Hibernate again. Want a real cross-platform UI design tool? Guess what, it aint in PRO-IV. But it is available inside Eclipse. Which is, oh yes, free.

PRO-IV's value proposition, when I started, was that (in the final analysis) you could write a simple data access/update screen in about 10 minutes, and it just worked. That was unique to the 4GL concept - no buggering about with data access, service layers etc. But the simple fact is that PRO-IV's been largely overtaken by what's available in Java and/or .Net, and Java and .Net (and probably many other things) do the re-usable component thing (viz global screens, updates, etc) simpler, better, faster these days. I can write a web page to display a list of something or other in a nicely formatted table, and link to a maintenance page, and have all of it managed transaction-wise, in not much more than the time that it takes to do the screen layout - that is those 10 minutes that PRO-IV used to do it in - in Java, using *free* software components. And I can then connect it all up to consume an external web service, and other things that PRO-IV can't really do natively, and have transactions managed properly, and security, and it's all version controlled through CVS or Subversion, and its compatible with release management tools, and, and, and...

So PRO-IV's lot will, probably, be to continue down the path of recurrent iterations of whatever the new tool is for development, and inevitably, whatever is next after VIP will be the saviour of PRO-IV developers ererywhere, and we'll all argue about whether it's any good, any why it ignores various principles of good UI design, and why it insists on being windows-only, and so on and so on. Rob's IDE will go the same way. And that's not to say that the IDE is bad, or VIP is bad, but that, in the end, the underlying platform is *fundamentally* flawed, because it can't escape its basic limitations.

I suppose that in the end my point is that PRO-IV's edge in 'RAD' is now seriously eroded - I'd suggest that it's now *more* expensive to maintain a well-built application in PRO-IV than it would be a well-built application in Java, and that means that you all have suddenly got a business case for moving apps to another platform (if you like .Net better than Java I'm not going to argue). That business case may be a multi-million spend, but it's time to take a serious look, because otherwise someone else just might.

Cheers

Dan

[Donald Miller]

Tyrone

Press Cancel - have you forgotten Pro IV convention already ?

I'll have a pint of what you're drinking ....

[Mike Wright]

F3 works pretty well in that situation as well.

I can't argue with the fact that VIP's 'eccentricly' laid out, and follows some strange conventions - but, really, once you start to code at speed you become blind to it's quirks.

And....if you put me back to Dev Studio...I would be much slower. Life's not too bad really - and neither is VIP.

Once Rob's IDE is ready we'll start using that if it's better (and I'm sure it is Rob -

Mikey

[Tyrone Hopes]

VIP is 'quirky' and 'eccentric' because it is not a windows compliant application fullstop, but looks like it is. Confusing. Imagine any external user from outside the blinkered world of Pro-IV arriving at a couple of windows like the screenshots above. And they certainly wouldn't know about F3. These screens are indefensible so please can everyone stop defending them. This is the point I'm trying to make - it shouldn't pretend to be a windows compliant product when it plainly isn't.

I am sure there are many talented individuals the world of Pro-IV that are able to adapt to using VIP. (Lord knows we've had to adapt before). However these talented developers must all have greater pain thresholds than me!

[CSuarezdelReal]

My two cents…

Fifteen years ago I had to learn by heart the commands to use Word Perfect, which were quite different from those to use Lotus 123, DBase III plus or Borland's Turbo Pascal, all of them successful and popular PC applications..

Then after a short battle against OS/2, Windows came to standardize eventually all the user interfaces of the applications that run inside a PC. Suddenly I was able to start taking advantage of a dozen of new applications in a matter or hours instead of days or weeks.

VIP may have a bizarre interface and non-sense behaviour, but when I first used ProIV (in the green screen interface) it was annoying and I admit it took me three or four weeks just to be able to deal time-efficiently with the interface, not to mention the logic behind it.

Information Technology has been homogenized, canned and labeled under a few brand names and sold in shelves in the supermarket, so that everybody has access to it.

The VIP style reminds me the mainframe old days, when an application could be weird and unique but powerful, and a bunch of IT professionals were willing to master it, because that was what was expected from us. To reach the masses, certainly sticking to the status quo is needed, so VIP would be failing, but if the goal is to produce a new, stylish skin for a tool that already has its followers, it may not be that bad.

[Rob Atherton]

Listen to Tyrone. These screens ARE indefensible. Because if "cancel" works then why the hell isn't the software programmed to simply treat close-window as a cancel ?

I may be wrong but I think this is a hang-over from Dev Studio. In the depths of my memory, I vaguely remember thing about memory problems if the users continually closed windows used the 'X' instead of the button marked close/exit/finish.

If that was the case, this solution is straight from the Tommy Cooper school of bug fixes. "I get memory problems when I press 'X' to close a window" "Well, we'll stop you doing it then"

I've only briefly looked at VIP so it's difficult for me to make much constructive criticism but its obvious that there is no control over design standards and I don't know but I would guess there are teams of people working on different parts of VIP without talking to each other. I can't think of any other reason why different standards are in place. Either that or quality control is non-existant.

Many people are writing off these inconsistencies as 'quirks' or things you get used to but you a customer (us) to gain confidence with a product (VIP) it should behave in standard way throughout the system. That's not too much to ask.

Still, we've had these discussions before. At least we don't have the logic editor in pink, proportional font anymore like in early versions of Dev Studio.

[Papa Lazarou]

Well it looks like I'm a bit late to the party

This is the famous 'morph' window.  It allows you to change an object from Selection Cycle (for example) to Many Time Paging Screen Cycle.  But where's the 'OK' or 'Cancel' buttons?  There are none!  If you press the top right hand 'close' you get the usual 'Window Close not Allowed' error

Must say that I can't recall seeing a "Window close not allowed" error message in VIP. It's not some application setting doing this is it?
The only one that comes to my mind is &#@SUPP-EXIT (if I've got that right) are you using that in your application? Or maybe someone knows of another environment/client configuration setting that could be causing this?

What version of ProIV/VIP is this anyway Tyrone? I'm using the version with the current ProIV install, 5.5922 and this one does have ok/cancel buttons on the famous(?) morph window! (anyway I think you can also just press return to select the same thing or tap the Esc key!)

And there is an answer coming to all this.

  A complete development environment which is managed code, follows windows standard, blazing fast, has everybodys wish lists and will give the RAD productivity back to PROIV.

  Watch this space.

Maybe 'Guest' could be a bit more forthcoming? or was that a belated april fools? or another plug for rob's IDE? or could it be... something else?

At least we don't have the logic editor in pink, proportional font anymore

Ah. happy days

[Matthews Estrice]

"You cannot teach an old dog new tricks" it was said to me.
Guys you will never believe that numbers of developers are still using Notepad to code languages like JAVA.
You talk about IDE,they bite the dust.
Working with ALL,Superlayer,@MODX,DEV-STUDIO then VIP J2EE and VB.net + Activex Control,ASP is not a problem.

We need to have open mind on developing.
Is either you are developer or not a developer.

We need to adopt to changes.VIP is a change of a computer language that can be improve.
Like the new IDE we would like to use it in C#,VB.net and J2EE.

My question is where to from here?
Critisism is a worse thing to do.

I beleive this new IDE that Rob is busy with will be called 'PROIV.net'.
Interesting !!!!!!!!!!

[Rob Donovan]

or another plug for rob's IDE?

Nope, I only post under my User name.

I've nothing to hide....

Rob D.