Re: [Dataperf] towards a modern DP

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 10:13:46 -0700

Bruce ,  I have tried many RAD systems over the years and didn't find anything so RAD( "rapid & dirty") as DP. All of them has a considerable learning curve and once you are attached to it, forget about use other things. And  sometime in the future they just stop everything , update to "new techonlogies " and you have to start to learn everything again. As Matt Dwyer wisely said, and Matt,  the only thing the I would correct you is that is not painful to learn to an old man, it's for all. And that's all the advantage of DP,  is a kind of a word processor with a Database with easily Data-driven reports, as Don well placed.  It's easiness is quite impressive. I don't know if some kind of paradigm for the previous generations but I find all the Object oriented world and consequently the windows world too visual. The last RADs that I used were very visual oriented and less user freindly oriented. I hate to keep choosing fonts, sizes, position at form, colors, shapes, buttons, arrows, etc, etc.. you just spent hours to compose a simple form and you also waste hours learning how to do that. This is one reason the market went down. I'm taking a course on FileMaker, it's a quite good product but you know , It takes me some days to do what I do in hours in DP. I keep insisting in using DP besides my knowledge is not so expert as you are because I find DP very late.  And as I said in other messages , I just can't see the simple user, that person which never programmed before, that house wife learning something like FileMaker or access. and it's not the there isn't a market for the soho , there always be a soho market but when things get a little bit more difficult, you know people jump off and try the minus effort law. And if less effort means use a word processor or a spreadsheet to store addresses, phones, customer contacts , make invoices , inventory and so on they simple do that. Your efforts are valid but I don't see anything so easy as dip been plausible with the tools we have. By the way, speaking about tool , does it reminds something to you ? It would be possible with it? Tell a little bit about those times and what Lew thought about it...
Rgds.
Fabio
--
Sent from my Android phone with GMX Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Bruce Conrad <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you, Don, for putting this into perspective. Good question about web-based application development... I would like to see one that allowed migration from an existing DP application. Will keep looking and thinking about this... Thanks again, and best wishes, Bruce

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Don Friedman <[email protected]> wrote:
Bruce - excellent stuff. I remain truly surprised that the need for simple database application generators never really took hold. It seemed to me that Q&A had a smart idea, a word processor with a database that could easily create data-driven reports and correspondence. There were a handful of other of these products out there and I suspect that at one time Lew thought DP would be a part of DataPerfect per se. It's not that DP failed on it's own to capture a market, the entire product category failed to capture a market. Do you think a web-based application development tool could do much better?

Don Friedman
ProfessionalRecords.Com LLC
PRS Data Systems
205 S Main Street
Pittsburgh, PA   15215
412-784-1600 - 1-800-PRS-FILE
412-784-1615 Fax

On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Bruce Conrad <[email protected]> wrote:
Our recent discussion about running DP on modern machines has set me thinking (again--over the years I have thought about this often).

It is wonderful that we can still run DP and I am grateful to those who have made it possible through virtual machines.

If anyone can think of an easy way to "port" DP to a more modern machine, I would love to be involved. Every idea that has occurred to me for doing this has so far turned out to be too difficult. Each time I have thought of how to automatically migrate existing DP applications to the more modern system.

A modern DP would probably not be simply a "windows" version, but rather a rapid application development system for data-based browser applications. With over a decade of experience building web applications--in languages such as Perl, C, bash, Java, and JSP--I know how challenging this can be, and how definitely requiring skill as a programmer.

For the first time, last week, I thought about the reverse process. That is, given a web application, what would it look like as a DP application. A couple of thoughts about this can be found at http://sanbachs.net/ha-then-now/index20150821.html and http://sanbachs.net/ha-then-now/ both based on (part of) a real web application.

I just finished a brief nostalgic post about my experiences with DataPerfect, which includes a brief list of its features. If I have left out anything you particularly appreciate about DP, please comment about them. The post is at http://conwithoutcon.blogspot.com/2015/08/continuation-without-compulsion.html

Many thanks and best wishes,
Bruce


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