Re: Can you say "World War III?"(You guys are wrong) -- MIDRANGE-L



> 10 years etc -sounds like an urban legand to me.

Well 10 years does not seem so far fetched to me. I personally know of one
company that has not IPL'd their AS/400 since the day they got it which was
over 5 years ago. Nor have they had any power outages that lasted longer
than their emergency generators...

> Most of the Microsoft bashing on this list is so ridiculous that I couldnt
> lower myself to reply.I like the AS/400, but I think Win2000 Server has
> caught up. Ive always been excited aboubt (how  Microsoft) tools and (new)
> products work well with all the technologies they have.

Wow excited about how MS tools work... I personally feel that VB programming
will be a featured torment in hell. I love how one day your VB5 Enterprise
program works and then according to the phase of the moon or some other
unknown force ( data pixies???) all the sudden starts to fail. Or how you
code something in ADO that works one minute and then 5 minutes later starts
complaining that there is not a valid object reference. (This in a single
read loop not doing anything to alter the ADO connection, command or
recordset objects. It is a good thing that there are 9 different ways to do
everything because you have to cycle through each one until you find the
magic combination for today. Oh and how about trying to read more than 32767
records from an ADO recordset. As you approach the wonderful magic number
( max signed 16 bit integer value) the performance of the read method
decreases exponentially until somewhere around 32000 records it took more
than an hour to read (just read) one record. Why in the world would someone
want to do this sort of batch processing on a PC? Well because that is what
the specs were and you allways do what the client requires. This was to have
been a data cleansing application for a data-mart that was going to be
stored in SQL server and then exported to ESSBase. Well needless to say,
after two months of fighting VB5 and ADO and a million calls and emails to
and from MS tech support we had to abandon this approach and guess what,
that client will never use VB for another application like that again... As
a matter of fact I expect them to re-evaluate their usage of VB5 altogether.
Shoot I could code something in C++ and have it debugged and in production
before the VB5 application made it past smoke testing. And programming
vertical market business apps in C++ is not a task that I feel is
appropriate to the language. But man oh man do they run fast when you are
done :-)

I am glad to hear that Rumba finally got their act together too. But then I
was using an early version of the ObjectX controls and they crashed all the
time. Win NT or not it did not matter.

I personally will stick to the AS/400 for business programs or as the back
end server and use Delphi for the front end. At least with Delphi you do not
have to worry about DLL hell !


Eric Wilson

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