On Thursday 03 July 2003 07:24, Lester Caine wrote:
Lester,
> Anybody got any 'insight' it what is going to happen in the
> next few years ;)
I can only tell you what I see from our clients. I our clients are some of
the largest in the UK (Local/National Government, most banks, insurance
companies etc.), and on the client side of things, .Net is not even on the
radar, one of our clients has not long completed upgrading their desktops to
NT4SP3, and don't plan to upgrade again till getting on for the end of the
decade. A number of clients (especially in local Government), have, or are
seriously considering, moving to Linux for their 'office suite' desktops
On the server side of things, there is not much Windows about above
departmental server level, and most of these Windows servers are running
MSExchange etc. Most servers above departmental level are running Unix of
some flavour or Mainframes, and it is at this level that most new development
is being done, and most of it in Java.
I have seen next to zero serious .Net development being done, and what I have
seen is is very trival "manager knocking stuff up in the lunch hour" type
stuff that was previously done in Access/VB.
As for the future, certainly for us, we have at least 4 years new development
work on Win32(Client) and Java(Server), plus at least another 5 years support
and maintenance. I certainly see .Net use in-house/department level
development that is currently being done in VB/Access, but I don't expect it
to make an impact in the more serious medium/large scale systems for a good
few years untill all the missing bits have been added and the platform has
proved itself, and of course people trust Windows based servers enough to run
their systems on.
As for Borland, I think it is good that they have solutions for
Java/Win32/Linux/.Net, but I think it is bad that they only seem to have have
a small amount of developers, so when they are working on one product, all
work on the others stop. The integration of lifecycle tools like together,
calaber etc is a good thing for 'enterprise shops', but is becoming a bad
thing for small shops and independant developers, especially as most of of
the 'day to day' features (client/server development, webservices, XML etc.)
is only available in their top-end SKUs. I used to buy my own copy of
Borland IDE's, even though my employer purchased them for work use, but with
two releases of JBuilder a year, Delphi, Kylix, and now their .Net stuff, I
have just given up doing that.
To bring it back on-topic, what ever tool/language we use, be it Java,
Delphi, VB, .Net, C++, Perl, Python, PHP etc. there is a driver or toolset to
use Firebird.