RE: BCD's WebSmart - feedback

Mark,

We have used WebSmart and continue to use it for our clients. To answer
your questions;

The IDE is user friendly. We found it has a fairly short learning
curve. It isn't necessarily as deep as some, but it gets the job done.

It is fully functional but lacks a strong visual HTML editor. We use
Dreamweaver or just copy, paste and tweak by hand.

"rolling out a build" depends on the customer, site, and configuration
of the server. Since these are CGI programs we typically build one or
two screens per program. So the amount of programs to deploy depends
the number and type of pages. We usually set up three apache servers
Dev, QA, Prod. You then move each program between environments.

Debugging is easy. There are however some issues with the debugger in
that you cannot "Step Into" a called program. We STRSRVJOB and STRDBG
on the CGI job and use the traditional debugger when we need to dig
deep.

Can't really answer the performance question. We have a 1200 cpw
partition and it is very fast. They are just RPG programs using the http
api's plus a few other bells and whistles.

WebSmart supports program call just like RPG does.

Is it worth the price? That depends. You are buying a tool. The first
project is always the most expensive. The next project will be more
productive. Some of our customers have made it their primary web
application development tool. Our experiences have been positive.

Their Nexus Portal is not a must have. It's a nice to have. You can
certainly roll your own log on programs. One of the nice things is that
WebSmart has several different methods for handling session persistence
without using the Nexus Portal.

I'm not sure how well it scales. We aren't using in the 1,000's hit /
hr environment. For us the biggest learning curve was learning HTML and
JavaScript.

Dan.....