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Phase II (Sep 93 - Mar 94): Design

' ... we don't have the C expertise and it's much more difficult to pick up than Powerbuilder. ... given a slightly different makeup in the team, for a similar size ... I would go for C++. ... If you've got something small, Powerbuilder is ideal, no problem. ... I would say if they could get just three C++ programmers together and maybe a bit more time, I would say, yes rebuild it in C++. As long as you really do take advantages of the C++ structure and the way it does allow you to modularise things then it's going to come out just as maintainable, it's going to be considerably better structured and it ain't going to fall over as often.

Having said that Powerbuilder ... there are still some things you shouldn't do but as long as you're aware of those it doesn't fall over. It's not like Powerbuilder II which falls over easily ... if it's small then Powerbuilder is the way to go because you're not going to want to set up this massive structure which is going to be a large part of your time. You're not going to want to build immensely complicated transaction control objects only to call them three times. ... Powerbuilder is one of those things, I speak to people in various companies ... and an awful lot of people, many of them doing stuff considerably smaller than this, that do say that if they had it over again then they would have written it in C. ...

I mean those with the money write it in Motif which is obviously the way to do it but we obviously can't afford to put an X-terminal or a Unix workstation on everybody's desk, ... which leaves us writing for Windows ... It just becomes a nightmare to work with, it's memory is all over the shop, access to Windows is all over the shop at present, but again OWL, MFC are major object libraries you're virtually writing in C++ and you're shielded from a lot of it. ... Certainly once you've got to know those frameworks, you can knock something up quickly. ...

Yes the likes of Powerbuilder are here to stay now because it does allow very rapid ??? it's just you have to be careful not to expect too much really. ... Powerbuilder itself will start losing out to the bigger players, but that sort of tool , VisualBasic will supersede it ... that's become considerably faster and it's well up to Powerbuilder in everything apart from the database access and that's improving rapidly, it's got Microsoft behind it and I can see it overtaking Powerbuilder before long. But then there's the sort of more half and half things gaining momentum like Ingres that now have a similar sort of thing where it's not the full feature thing where you can really design all these glorious things, really building Windows stuff from scratch but it's much higher level objects that you have less control over ... '

X042 page 002.05c (tape 05.2.04c) Matt Notes/Tape 14/06/94

Social influence: Individual: Experience
Technical influence: IT environment: Development software


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