4 replies to this topic

[Rob Donovan]

Hi,

As requested, a new poll to see where people are with ProIV nowadays...

Rob.

[Mike Peterson]

VIP 6.2 is an absolutely awesome development tool. Anyone wishing to do major overhaul or development will be very happy transitioning from @MOD to VIP.

[Steve Houghton]

Mike

I first used @MOD in 1984 and it was't very good then. VIP/Pro-IV Developer is a great step forward but could be so much better with some input from the Pro-IV community. There are many developers who could improve it and I can only wonder what Rob could achieve given some resources.

I still use VIP and have developed some amazing functions but find it very frustrating.

Finally I am totally amazed that anybody in 2011 uses 'green screen'.

Regards
Steve

[Rob Donovan]

Hi,

I still think VIP/Developer is an awful tool, and actually hinders development rather than helps. I'm really sad that ProIV / Northgate just would not talk to me about ProIV IDE.

Anyone who has used IDE says it a great tool, and is far better than anything else.... this isn't just my view, its the view I've gotten from lots of developers who have used it.

At the moment though, I've just stopped developing IDE a few weeks ago now, and stopped giving out trial licenses, as I just get too much resistance from 'above', and not enough interest... yes, in effect, I've given up, sorry

It seems to be more 'political' rather than they don't want to use or embrace IDE.

Over the last 3-4 yrs, IDE has been very stable, and used by a large 30-40 man development team, with very little if no complaints or problems, and I've continually enhanced and added features to it.

I even did some documentation on it a while ago also... which was a painful experience for a developer

http://www.proivrc.c...DE-Overview.pdf


As for the people using @MOD, I have no idea why they do that

ProAIDE or their own editors (even if its just LSDEF in a paging screen) is much much better than @MOD.

I also have an old editor I wrote, similar to ProAIDE for GS apps. I think that even with all my old utils, it still quicker to develop in than VIP/Developer. IDE then just makes that even quicker and better.

Recently, users of IDE have told me that they think its 100% if not more quicker to develop in IDE than ProAIDE etc, and not only enables them to write code faster, but also better and with less bugs.

As for 'Green Screen', I think its just that some of the huge 'backend' systems out there, its just too much work to convert to a GUI version, and to be honest, if you're going to spend that much time and effort, would you really still use ProIV for your front end?... rather than some standard language that is either free or widely used by 1000s if not 100s x 1000s of developers?

I've talked to some users, and they much prefer and are able to operate quicker in a GS env than a GUI one.

To create a 'good' GUI environment is actually quite a skill, and just converting the GS -> GUI is normally not a great way to go. Redesign of the system is what is needed to take advantage of how GUI can help, or it can be slower to use than the GS was.

I'm not against GUI systems (Obviously, I've written / worked on GUI apps), but if you have a system with 1000s of functions, and has heavy development on it, then converting to GUI is not always a priority.

Rob.

[Chris Pepper]

Well we're still here, still developing green screen, actually still developing on Version 3... though we will finally be moving development to 5.5 later this year. As Rob says I can't see why we'd ever bother to move to any other development environment than @MOD and a bunch of custom utilities. The only thing we might flirt with is a text only development. That's because we are just developing Updates and and some Reports. Around 4000 functions in total so there's still a substantial amount of code around.

The most important thing for us is the customised code-repository we have handling the complex stuff like a large number of releases and complex interdependencies of different versions of global logics / file definitions being appropriate to different releases of the system; being able to gen the correct combinations appropriate to individual clients and provide the correct code out of escrow. The real code is basically the text representation of the functions anyway - they only get loaded into a development environment to edit them or a different one to gen them. It's all stored as text anyway so it's easy to store and diff between versions in the code management system. The temptation is to play with the text format a little and be able to edit it directly with a standard text editor!

It's not worth the hassle of installing and maintaining the ProIV front end on the developers' systems as it's not being used in the runtime environment. We just use a lightweight terminal emulator, which is needed to setup and manage the test regions anyway.