Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 19:38:14 -0800 Reply-To: The NOMAD2 Discussion List Sender: The NOMAD2 Discussion List From: Matthew Grecsek Subject: OASIS: Meeting, Front and Center The following is a summary of the meeting with Roger Cox, Product Manager for Front & Center. Roger talked about the new J42 application development product with great enthusiasm. J42 (from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, the answer to everything) was developed in Europe. It creates a default GUI application with forms for each table from a schema. J42 writes code, menus, has a drill down capability, and includes all rules, limit checks and so on, included in the schema. J42 creates applications for Front & Center and Nomad character products. The first level of pricing for a yearly fee of $2500 will include 5 Windows or 5 Unix copies (sold by platform only), and upgrades. I asked Roger what enhancements were being planned for Front & Center, and what its role is in Must's marketing strategy over the next 5 years. Roger said that the developers were working on improved performance for the database, adding more 'widgets' such as gas gauges and spin buttons. The product direction is to support Chicago/Windows 95 and OLE 2.0, however, have no plans to run on NT as a client platform, only as a supported server platform. The developers are exploring remote procedure calls, Sybase cursor support, and direct SQL access to any of the engines they support. The group is also working on letting users kill the fetch or kill the query, as well as an increase from 64 Meg to 1 gigabyte for databases. Thompson is investigating message- based processing support so that more processing can be done on the server instead of the client. The Form Painter product is not fully supported today, but he hopes it will be completed shortly. Roger said they have no plans to decommit to PC Nomad at this time, but more support will be given to the GUI, and new releases will probably be minimized. He emphasized that core level enhancements will benefit all programs/platforms. In the next 5 years, they expect to see the mainframe declining, and Front & Center and ODB Server will be playing a much larger role. Thomson pays high fees each year to be able to interface with Gupta, Sybase, and Oracle and plan to keep up these relationships. Front & Center is targeted as the front end to the RP Server and the ODB Server, and is used by the Professional Services group to develop GUI applications. Without a GUI toolset for building applications, it will be difficult to compete in the open market against products like PowerBuilder or Visual Basic. -Matthew Grecsek, OASIS mgrecsek@ix.netcom.com back to index