Will@cup.portal.com (Will E Estes) (10/31/90)
I would appreciate feedback from commercial and in-house developers and consultants who develop business applications about your choice of development languages and tools for programming client-server applications that work in a LAN environment. The questions are: 1) What percentage of your organization's LAN-oriented development takes place using C, Cobol, and 4GLs? (e.g., C:60%, Cobol:10%, 4GLs:30%) 2) What are the critical factors that dictate your organization's choice of the language(s) that you specified in question 1? 3) In the future, as 4GL tools from vendors like Oracle and Informix become available on LANs and become more robust, will you continue to develop client-server applications using C and Btrieve or Cobol, or will you switch to 4GLs? Again, why? 4) Have you developed, or do you plan to develop, applications that require you to write custom code on both the client and the server, and if so what did the application do? (Note: this question assumes that you are using a server that allows for a user-written process such as Netware/386 or LAN Manager on OS/2.) 5) If you had to write an application today that required you to develop custom code on the client and the server, then would you use A) a transport library (e.g., Novell's IPX libraries or a TCP/IP sockets library) or B) an Remote Procedure Call (RPC) tool? 6) What are the critical factors that dictate your choice of tools in question 5? Thanks, Will Estes (sun!portal!cup.portal.com!Will)