Hi, here my 2cents....

besides from beeing stable and the support, and jason himself i have some
other reasons to use IBO....

1. Speed.....
IBO's double-buffering mechanism and the parsing-intelligence
make visual apps a lot more responsive than any IBX could be...

2. CallBacks and other stuff....
While IBX freezes at any lengthy query, IBO provides me the
possibility, to cancel my query or show the progress

3. The visual components....
I don't need any third-parties at all....Jason's and also Geoff's
components have everything included, what I need, beginning from
the Grid to the comboboxes and lookups...especially the grids and
multicolumn-dropdowns in the Lookups are a killer

4. The parsing intelligence....
IBO will generate all my DDL for me...with IBX, I had to write
upadte-sql, insert-sql and delete-sql, what a PITA....
And don't we forget about generator-links and other goodies...

5. The state-aware components....
The search-Mode is a killer....even full-text searching in
subtype-1 blobs
And having them switch the color dependant of the state
is another thing, I was doing by hand before IBO....

6. No persistent fields but dataset-stringlists..
Switching an IB_Grid to a different datasource at runtime
with IBX?? well, don't even think of such things...
With IBO the grid will adjust and act just like I want
it to....visible fields, column-headers and ordering-links
will show as designed, without one line of code....
The Dataset-side stored properties were the hardest point
for me to get familiar with, but it is a bless now for me,
after I got used to it...Generating a customizeable app
with an UI-repository as seen on the big CRM/ERP-systems
is more than easy with this....a few tables, a column
subtype 1 for each Property-Stringlist and there you go...
Load the properties and the SQL, set request-live to true
and the UI (well, the grids, and the SearchPanels) are
finished already...iterate through the columns and create
a few edits, and there you go like the big ones....

7. Did I mention speed???

8. Well, IBX has come a long way now, and it is far away from
the unstable state since its initial release.
Jason, you are definitely pushing it too hard with trashing
Jeff for his really hard work. Besides that, IBX has still
quite a big list of bugs, and I wouldn't recommend it for
prodcution-releases, especially when dealing with long
transactions, and with large tables, where the buffer is
pushed to the limit.....IBO is by far more stable and better
for prodcution apps, and when used with the native
architecture and components your app will be a lot better...

9. The great pssibilites of fine-tunig your app....
IBO has such a rich buffet of properties to fine-tune your
app...IBX has almost none of them....

10.The IBO-Bars
Well, the bars themselves are cool, but what really rocks
is the Focussing-architecture behind IBO....ever tried
to have a central toolbar for an MDI-app with the classic
VCL-architecture??

11.IBO allwos me to (almost) forget about Client/server
My IBO apps are often really bad Client/server apps. I am using
Grids very much, Lookpups and incremental searching....
Every Client/Server guy will say, how bad this is, and that I
should do this only with ISAMs like Paradox, but hey, my app
is damn fast and responsive...And my users are happy, as they
have the UI like the user wants it, and not how the architecture
needs it...
I often read on the newsgroups from people, that their users have
to forget about the ISAM-comfort they were used to, and that
Client/Server needs compomises....Well, my users would shoot
these guys directly....Not the user has to rethink, but the
developer has to think harder :-)))
And it works really: Large result-sets are not built
because of IBO's double-buffering and the network-load is also
low....Well, don't try to do such apps without IBO, your
network-admin will kill you :-))

Well, IBX is not that bad as Jason wants it to be. But instead ot pointing
out, how bad IBX is, it would be really better to proove, how much better
IBO is :-))

I have provided several points, where no other architecture (not BDE, not
IBX and also not any other) can cope with....there are a lot more of them,
whcih I will perhaps write down the next time or so...
People shouldn't be pointed towards IBO by saying "use it, because IBX is
trash", but because of these points, where IBO is superior by design...
I am a 2-tier developer of visual apps, not a 3-tier developer, so most of
the really great parts of IBO are not of that interst for me....My focus is
on the visual components, and it is on 80% of the IBX-developers, too,
methinks. IBO has such a great collection of native controls that are alone
worth to move over, and the underlying architectural goodies are a point for
the other 20%....
my suggestions is therefore, show them, how cool your apps are and look with
IBO, and they will move anyway :-))


CU, Kaputnik
(Nick Josipovic)

nick@... <mailto:nick@...>
kap@... <mailto:kap@...>
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