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| Set your own
standard for 3000 client-server interfaces, because HP
won’t
At last month’s IPROF meeting, Nick Demos, co-chair of the Special Interest Group for User Interfaces and VPlus, called again for HP to set a standard or direction for client-server interfaces for the HP 3000. The SIG is asking for something HP hasn’t even been able to define in its own use of HP 3000s. HP’s client server strategy at several sites, including the US Response Centers, calls for modular, replaceable, thin clients. The clients are considered the most replaceable part of the system. Far from recommending a client-side language, the philosophy allows for experimentation. Jon van den Berg of Premier Software Technologies, formerly on HP’s IT staff, listed about a half-dozen client server development languages that have been used at HP’s Mountain View and Atlanta response centers. The half-life of client server languages is shorter than the projected half-life of many HP 3000 applications. Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB) is popular and one of the easier to learn. Borland's Delphi is probably the best designed object oriented language and has strong back-end interfaces. Object oriented languages are powerful in the hands of those who can master the paradigm, and otherwise the language can be used as a regular 3GL. Powerbuilder has many high-level features built in and it runs on PCs, Macs, and many flavors of Unix, which allows for easy three-tier development. The learning curves for both Delhi and Powerbuilder are steeper than for VB. The various visual C++ systems produce highly portable code, but how many business programmers are comfortable even reading the stuff? Smalltalk, with its artificial intelligence-like approach, will likely remain but as a niche player. Visual COBOL, especially an objected oriented variety, makes a lot of sense for transitioning COBOL programmers. If I were a god, I would make
the standard a choice between Delphi or a Visual Object Oriented COBOL. HP
is in much the same boat as I am for making this call. In my opinion the
Interex special interest groups SIG-Client Server and SIG UIF-VPLUS are in
as good a position as HP is to provide guidance to the user community. I
don’t recall hearing much from them on this issue at IPROF. Copyright The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved |
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