I haven't looked at development tools for MV of late, including
DesignBAIS and Visage, but was wondering what the difference is between
these two tools and what other tools would be placed in the same
category.

Do these two products address the same problems, meet similar
requirements, provide similar features, work in similar environments,
cost similar dollars...? If we did put them head to head in a
build-and-maintain-a-software-application-over-five-years competition,
which one would provide the better bang for the buck?

Inquring minds want to know. Anyone? --dawn

P.S. Yes, of course I know it is a(n) <<choose an adjective>> question.

Other products that immediately spring to mind, with varying degrees of
overlap, include WADE (OHM), WebWizard (Via Systems), SB+ (Via
Systems), Osmosis (CA Software), OpenInsight (Revelation), mvDesigner
(Raining Data), Nucleus (Binary Star) - and many more.

Also, where do you draw the line in terms of "development tools"? I
would think other products that would also fit into this category to
varying degress would include MITS (MITi), mvQuery (MMT), Informer
(Entrinsik), and possibly even people like 1mage, Accuterm GUI
(Accusoft) and The Programmers Workbench (Bo ?) - and where do you
"slot" mv.NET (and/or Uni-objects), where the development takes place
with another "development tool"

Hmm, I don';t think VIA are taking out IBM this week - SB+ should be
IBM (I think)

dawn wrote:


I have to be careful what I say here...

I'd suggest the category would be for developing browser-enabled
applications for use in a trusted environment. The "form-designers" for
both appear to share many of the characteristics of the VB form
designer. I've worked on developing dynamic-HTML apps, and Visage, and
VB with UniObjects - but never DesignBAIS. Both Visage and VB use a
similar form-designer although Visage is, of course, more attuned to
dealing with MV/Pick files than VB. I *believe* DesignBAIS is similar.

Visage has a D3/Delphi/VB heritage. DesignBAIS appears to come from a
similar heritage, although with more of a U2/SB+ background. Neither
appears to be ideally suited for development and/or deployment in the
internet zone - to be served up by any web server and run on any
browser. Both seem to rely heavily on Microsoft. I could be wrong - but this
is my impression.

As for cost - I believe DesignBAIS is priced lower aiming for a very
large market (in Pick/MV terms).

The strong points of both appear to be in form design. Visage also
offers pessimistic locking and DesignBAIS doesn't, afaik. Visage also
extends the attribute/multivalue/subvalue limits, allowing you to nest
away to your heart's content, although there are complications when you
have forms hanging off rows/cells.

My own development framework, which uses FC to connect the browser to
the application-server, would knock spots off either of them for
developing apps to be deployed over the internet in a non-trusted
environment - if I ever get it finished. I'd love to work with someone
on it - rather than just tinker way in my "spare" time. Even in its
earlier incarnation it was used to develop full-blown apps, with
pessimistic locking, for use in-house and to develop a web-site used to
sell insurance over the web. I strongly doubt that Visage, DesignBAIS
or mvDesigner would have come close to doing as good a job. When you
consider that motor and household insurance claims can involve *very*
large settlements if anything was to slip thru the "net", I'm sure you
will appreciate that security was paramount - and that the end-users
would find any loop-hole in the app and use it to their advantage.
Another important consideration was that the end-users could be using
any browser. That's a large part of the reason for almost everything
being done on the D3 application server. Although there is rudimentary
validation etc. on the browser/client, everything is properly validated
on the application server. There is also minimal "impedance mismatch"
in that there was virtually no middle tier. Things served up from the
application-server simply passed through the web-server to the DOM.
Very fast. No unnecessary transformation or "cludge".

Developing apps for deployment in a trusted, known, environment is a
whole different ball-game to developing "real" browser-based,
deploy-anywhere, apps.

Both Visage and DesignBAIS appear to me to be far and away superior to
VB6/UniObjects, btw. I haven't used VB.Net yet.

Mike.

PS. All of the above is merely my opinion based on experience and, in
the case of DesignBAIS at least, hearsay.

Mike Preece wrote:

Based on the last pricing I saw these products were (literally) within
$1 of each other in terms of an annual subscription - and DB didn't
offer a "traditional" licence model.

Well where to start.

DesignBais is used for developing browser based apps and people are
using it in both trusted and non-trusted (public) environments. While
it is true that originally it was used more in trusted environments, a
lot of work has gone into the product since then. We have banks using
the product happily and they're pretty picky (pun intended) about
security.

DesignBais does have a traditional pricing method - if that means buy a
"perpetual license" for a concurrent user. But as we are often not
working in a traditional environment we have several different models
and we make it a point to work with the developers business model to
make sure all parties involved are happy.

We are also very keen to make sure that the product is available over
many MV platforms. It is currently available on D3, Universe and
Unidata, ONware and look for a few more platforms to be announced and
available at Spectrum. We are doing final testing on several as we
speak. Some will be expected and one or two may surprise you ;-)

Currently we are based in the Microsoft products but then so is 90% of
the world. We are constantly looking at other environments and will
expand this view as the business demands. We do have a W3C model for
using other browsers and can also take advantage of PDA type devices.

Anyone can have a look at the product - there is a 60 day "test-drive"
on the web site (www.designbais.com) and we are extremely pleased with
the feedback that we have received over the last few months. I strongly
beleive that DesignBais can breathe new life into the MV world as it
brings those apps with the best business logic in the world look as if
they belong in the 21st century. We have several customers who have
told me that it has happened for them.

We have several brand new applications that have been written in
DesignBais - always a very good sign.

I don't know how to compare our product with others in the market but I
do know that we
would love to show you more of DesignBais.

Either give us a call/email at infoATdesignbaisDOTcom for more info or
come see us at Spectrum. It will be fun. We hope to see you there.

Dave Bryant
DesignBais

DaveinBoston wrote:

Hi DaveInBoston -- I like the tease on that. Since I won't be at
Spectrum (it is men-only except for vendors, right? ;-) this year, I do
hope you will pipe up here and let us know when we can find out. If it
is Berkeley DB or DB-XML, I'll be surprised. Cache' might be
interesting. An OSS version on OpenQM would be really surprising. SQL
Server would be surprising, but I would yawn. ;-)

And here I was trying to be mainstream and I'm sitting in a place where
most of those I talk to regularly (outside of this forum) avoid MS
wherever feasible. I tend to agree with folks who say that Microsoft ravages
their installed base worse than the average s/w company, but I'll also
agree that there are advantages if you can standardize on MS tools.

Great!

I don't know you really well, Dave, but enough to suspect you do know
at least a little bit how to compare your product with others in the
market ;-) I had planned to take in your free webinar and couldn't fit
it in at the time.

At some point later this year I'll probably take a look. I'm really
..NET and MS ignorant, however. I'm also a big fan of developer
libraries and not much of a fan of generated code, so I'm curious which
approach you take. Cheers! --dawn

Glen B wrote:

Obviously compiling generates code too. The level that I don't like is
any level where you would ever look at what was generated in order to
debug unless it is round-trip where you can change either the code or
the spec.

I'm good with libraries or frameworks and with round-trip specs to and
from code. I'm not sure what all of my reasons are for being weary of
code generators and I recognize there is a lot of code generating that
goes on in a variety of ways, but I've decided to see what I can do to
avoid most code generators for a while. Cheers! --dawn

Glen,

The demo would be MS Browser -> (Web server) IIS -> Database Server (D3
on linux)

The database can be any one of the supported hardware/OS platforms

So there would be 3 systems in the demo (i suppose 2 if the browser and
the web server are on the same box)

Regards

Dave Bryant


Glen B wrote:

Dawn - we will definitely let this group know the additional platforms
that will be supported.

Dave