04132345.txt 13-Apr-00


CA-Visual Objects is sinking rapidly

Subject: Re: CA-Visual Objects is sinking rapidly
From: John Lewis <J_Lewis@dial.pipex.com>

Dear Halldor-Ingi

I would like to recommend R&R Reportwriter Version 8.0 for
your reporting needs.  There is very little you cannot do
with it.  I have been using it since 1991 (the good old DOS
days). With the latest window versions you can do charts and
sophisticated forms.  I am sending you an email with a pdf
file of a fax report that we fax directly from a VO app
using WinFax, (PDFQuote.pdf).  The pdf file was also
produced directly from R&R by selecting the PDF printer
device.

Alternatively if you like the report writer in Access, you
could try Crystal Reports.  The Access Report Writer is a
cut down version of Crystal Reports. I have both but prefer
R&R, (just my preference).

I can even email  my reports with an email app written
entirely with VO, so I think you will agree that VO is a
very powerful medium.  If you abandon VO simply because of
CARET its like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In other words get rid of CARET but sut stick with VO

Regards

John Lewis, (UK)


Subject: Re: CA-Visual Objects is sinking rapidly
From: Gary Post
<gary.postNOgaSPAM@ci.alexandria.va.us.invalid>

Could you take a moment and provide some guidance.  I have a
couple of applications which were written in Clipper and
over the years have served us well.  Now we find that these
applications no longer operate reliably on Win98, WIN-NT,
and Win2000 workstations.  It seems that making adjustments
in the parameter settings for the DOS window within which
these applications run don't really resolve our problems.
There is also a separate set of problems that relate to
getting these applications to print to network printers
properly as we used a lot of HPPCL level 2 parameters in our
programs to format the many reports which support these
financial applications.

So, we are considering rewriting the applications and find
that there are many choices, Visual Objects, Visual Basic,
Access, just to name a few.  We really have no needed
structural changes in the applications so we would like to
make this conversion focused on just getting the basic
functionality back to running on the users new workstations.

Do you have a recommendation for which of the products we
should look at closely to use for this conversion?

Thank you for your assistance.

Gary Post

Subject: Re: CA-Visual Objects is sinking rapidly

From: Samuel Wong <hinfun@pop.jaring.my>

I would recommend anybody who wish to learn new reporting
tools to look further on what today business intelligence
can give you.

Today, we are being face by different vendors offering
different formats of data. It is important that a tools
should be able to work seamlessly with any data format or
output you might be embarking.

Today, MS Access is good because it can give what you want,
but what if your customer request your database to be
upgraded to Oracle, IBM DB/2 etc... You might even look into
how the reporting tools handles OLAP, MOLAP  technology and
generating it over web either as HTML, ActiveX hosted, Java
hosted or XML.

Rewriting something is a developer's nightmare and
investigate into tools like Crystal Report, Brio, Cognos to
get started.

.02

Sam