> On the other hand, almost every IBO user agrees that, at some point, you
> just have to make the switch to native IBO to fully exploit the product.
> *That* is a learning curve; perfect BDE emulation in the
> TDataSet-compatible components doesn't change it much, and preteding
> there's no harder learning curve in IBO because of the TDataSet
> emulation components won't help either. ;-)

Yes and No.

I have a number of modules that are simply 'BDE lookalikes' and I am not going
to change their interface because it works, and with IBO it now actually runs
24/7.

On the other hand, where I want a grid view with selectable ordering,
incremental search, and colour coding, then implementing it in IBO has scrapped
WEEKS of work trying to achieve the same thing other ways.

With the current generation of IBO, both co-exist nicely, a clean start using
simple IBO native will produce a powerful result in a lot less time than trying
to do the same thing any other way. It takes some getting used to, but the
saving far outway the effort. If what you want to give the customer looks like
IB_WISQL then why re-invent the wheel.

I have scrapped several other library packages which did bits and pieces, and
now new application modules drop into place faster.

The learning curve is made more difficult trying to drop native IBO into an
established BDE prroject and I would recomend people start from scratch and
build a clean application in order to understand native properly. Its 'mindset'
rather than 'learning curve' that is the problem - and I had the same problem
which stopped me using IBO six months before I tried again. That was July 1999
- by March 2000 I was still batlling to make BDE work and failing so as a last
resort I tried IBO again, and the combination of then improved IBO-TDatabase
and an understanding of what BDE was doing wrong had me running better It was
the understanding of what BDE did wrong that stopped me bothering with a very
flaky IBX at that time even though I had paid for Builder 5 in another attempt
to solve problems - It didn't! Only the switch to IB6 killed the remaining
problem of dropped connections, because we could not rely on some of the
network connections.

Since the end of last year the results have been stable, fast product and
customers are not now saying "Well if Interbase is so unstable what will it
cost to switch to something else!". For me IBO's only shortcoming is that I did
not start usinging it sooner. I could probably achieve the same with IBX as it
is now, but I have even paid Borland for help in the past without getting
anything, so while I may be forced to stick with Builder, I would not risk a
switch back to their flaky database access tools.

This has also to be seen in the light that I was only back on BDE as it was the
only way to access Interbase. I had previously dropped BDE in favour of
Codebase using dBase files back in 1992, with the same sort of results. BDE has
never worked for production environments!

--
Lester Caine
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L.S.Caine Electronic Services