DaveinBoston wrote:

Do we take this to mean that DesignBAIS is incapable of "doing"
pessimistic locking on the web - even as an "optional extra"? I had a
brief look at the website but couldn't readily locate the part that
promotes this shortcoming.

DesignBAIS seems to me to be a direct competitor for Visage. The main
difference, as far as I can tell, is that the folks behind DesignBAIS
have made considerably more effort and gone to considerably more
expense to advertise/promote/market their product - way beyond
repeatedly pushing their product on free newsgroups. DesignBAIS is more
of a cross-platform product too, I believe. Oh yeah - another
difference would appear to be that Visage can handle pessimistic
locking just fine.

I have argued in favour of pessimistic (READUs) over optimystic (she'll
be right - or the user can re-enter) locking a lot. The main objections
always seem to come from those who work in an environment, or with a
toolkit, that doesn't allow pessimistic locking "out of the box". If
READUs had never been available in PickBasic I guess we would have
found some kind of DIY alternative. I don't think so many business
software packages would have sold over the decades if software locking
was our only option. Saying you can't do READUs for a web/browser based
PickBasic app is incorrect - and warning against it is naughty, imo.

Mike.

<michael (AT) preece (DOT) net> wrote in message
Mike,

The only difference between a soft lock and a hard lock is who manages it.

READU is a convenience to the programmer, not the user.

Mark Brown

A lock set by a READU and managed by the DBMS gets a lot more respect
from everything everywhere than the home-brewed software lock, or
optimystic "see about it later" variety. The user might not *need* to
know how much respect is being shown - but will feel a little betrayed
if promises made by the application are not honoured. In other words :
READUs are 'real' and reliable. Anything else is wishful thinking.

Cheers
Mike.

If you are looking at progressively moving an application from green
screen to GUI (in any shape & size) then being able to keep your green
screen code unchanged & intact, but at the same time "play fair" with
the new GUI code, then I would have thought that was a good thing.

Typically when people select Visage to evolve their applications they
will start off with enquiry routines, then move to reports & minor
transactional entry processing before (ever?) tacking their core
business transaction processing systems- indeed there is nothing wrong
with keeping BOTH - let the hard core users continue to use the green
screen, and let managers & KlicKiddies use the GUI

The ability to mix'n'match your application solution, without touching
existing logic, is just one of the ways that we can help people on the
journey

MIke,
You are correct that by itself (out of the box) DesignBais doesn't do
pessimistic locking. We feel it is not the right thing to do, for all
the reasons you have heard before. HOWEVER we do provide a way for
DesignBais to hand over doing I/O so that it is under user control, and
of course there you can do whatever you like.

Dave Bryant

Hi Dave,

A couple of questions about your web site:

Do you think that the background is white?

I am instructed to go download IE6 then I can download an evaluation
copy. Does this mean that I need IE6 to use your software or simply
that you don't know how to allow download for other browsers?

TIA,
-Tom