donnelly@mergvax.UUCP (Mark Donnelly) (03/18/88)
I was reviewing the prices for Unify and Accell and noticed quite a difference in the cost of these two products. Granted Unify is a older product and Accell is newer but is it really 2 to 3 times better at least to warrant the 2 to 3 times price difference? Mark Donnelly philabs!mergvax!donnelly
domq@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Dominique Emerson) (03/19/88)
in article <324@mergvax.UUCP>, donnelly@mergvax.UUCP (Mark Donnelly) says: > > > I was reviewing the prices for Unify and Accell and noticed quite > a difference in the cost of these two products. Granted Unify is a > older product and Accell is newer but is it really 2 to 3 times better > at least to warrant the 2 to 3 times price difference? > Depends on when and how fast you need to accomplish your job. After more than a dozen jobs done under Accell, one company I am working with decided to redo part of their point-of-sale application in HLI. All agreed that to finish the job in Accell would take 2 weeks and to do it in HLI would take 4 to 6 months - the trade off in terms of low level control of B-tree usage made the trade off worth it to these folks. Furthermore, they would not be shipping anything before then and knew the exact design they wanted - meaning few changes were anticipated. I have seen enough c-based projects and 4gl based work done at this point to suggest and confirm the notion that productivity is much faster, more flexible and far easier to maintain with a 4gl based product. The two issues of most concern seem to be cpu usage and control of the application at all times. The cpu issue seems to be of less concern in that all cases I have looked at had problems because of poor design. True on might get 7/8 as many users per system, but with MIPS the major area of performance improvement in the industry today - the concern doesn't seem too great when contrasted with the other benefits. The issue of control is another matter. I have seen some instances when the application requirements did not match well with Accell. In that case one should use HLI. - Dominique Emerson