Thin Client - With/Without SO

[RonMoffat]

We are about to commence re-development of our system towards a 3-Tier, Thin Client Structure, and are considering going down the Smart Object route with v9.1c.

1) Does anyone have any experience of re-development towards 3-Tier, Thin Client structure. Any Good/Bad Experiences, Suggestions or advice would be welcome!

2) We will be under a fairly tight schedule, and will probably be working on a 2-stage process (phase-1 Extraction of Display & Phase-2 Separation of Database Access and Business Logic). Would this impact on the decision whether or not to use Smart Objects.

3) Given a tight schedule for re-development, what would be the arguements for/against using Smart Objects in the re-development, as opposed to using an Ojbect Orientated Design approach using Progress functions/procedures within libraries?

Any Suggestions/Advice Welcome!

Ron Moffat

 

[MurrayH]

What about .Net (with Office XP) or Java and using Progress "proxies"??

Murray

 

[mra]

Hi!

We've developed an application in java, using appservers as the connection to the database. It works quite smoothly except for the stability of the appservers.

Speed is acceptable. There are some overhead in calling the methods on the appserver, but by optimizing the serialize methods we've minimized this.

Our application is very query intensive (using dynamic queries), and this sometimes brings the appservers to their knees (they have some kind of memory leak).

We're also in the process of choosing a new set of tools. We're considering SmartObjects (for rapid development, and easy 3-tier segmentation) and C++ and ODBC (for flexibility, and portability).

Right now C++ / ODBC is losing because of poor performance in the ODBC server.

In my opinion, SmartObjects will get you to the goal fast, unless you need to change the functionality build into the SO. Performance is fairly good, at the price of increased memory use.


Hope you find it useful.

Comments to the C++ / ODBC part would be appreciated.

Regards
Mike