Upfront comments

From: Glenn Vade 

I am currently in the middle of evaluating UPFRONT here at NRMA.
I must say that it is a very impressive little package (at first). It 
comes on one 3.5" floppy, you type 'setup', wait 5mins, and its done.
It 'automatically' turns your boring character based ABF screen into a 
boring 'GUI' screen. Mind you every user I have shown it to says 'WOW!'.
You can easily enhance the window to include bmps etc and turn fields 
into buttons etc. With a bit of fiddling you can make the window look 
quite respectable - all without any code. Your ABF application still runs 
the way it always has and Upfront does its bit over the top. When you 
click on a field with the mouse Upfront actually performs  in the 
background which is a good thing otherwise essential field validations 
could be skipped.

Some negatives found so far are :
As a VT terminal emulator - it sucks bad.
Its slow from screen to screen
Its VERY slow when scrolling thru a table field
It loses it when typing ahead

This on version 1.11.1  It seems new versions come out quicker than.... 
so a 'fix' for some of this may already be available.

Overall though, it does appear to be very impressive and may satisfy the 
users 'supposed' need for GUI.

Glenn Vade
NRMA
Sydney Australia


From: emvy@platon.com (Maarten Veerman)

> Jerry_P._Clare%CHASE%CHASE_NA_EXTERNAL@notes.worldcom.com says...
>
> Has anyone had any experience with CA new product called UPFRONT ? I am told 
> it uses scraping technology to convert ABF to GUI based objects. 
> In addition it has customizable features which allows some conversion to
> certain windows objects (i.e. radio objects, etc.).
>
> Jer

I have tried this package out fairly extensively; even demo'd it to
an Ingres users group meeting & several potential clients.

It *does* make your ABF applications look pretty. With some work,
you can have a very GUI-looking app. There are some gotchas,
but it works amazingly well.

Quite easy to learn & to use, a smart end-user can do the customizations
without much help from programming staff. Gives you buttons, scroll
bars, the works.

Only problem is price. CA definitely wants too much money for this
product for it to gain wide acceptance. At $400+ per seat, you
look hard at other alternatives. However, if you have a large
suite of ABF apps that need "GUI" on the checklist, this will
get you the tick-mark...

-- MV
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-MV (Maarten Veerman)        Platon Consulting Limited, New Westminster, B.C.
emvy@platon.com              AIX-UNIX, Ingres, & Forest Industry Applications
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From: Kelly Woodhead (kellyw@caci.co.uk)

Hi we would like to add:

I'm a member of the Upfront development team here in the UK and wondered
if I could respond to the comments Made By Glenn Vade about upfront.

They were:

> Some negatives found so far are :As a VT terminal emulator - it sucks bad.
> Its slow from screen to screen
> Its VERY slow when scrolling thru a table field
> It loses it when typing ahead

The version Glenn was using was version 1.11 this is very very old and
out of date.  The product is now up to version 1.90 and has improved a
great deal.  For example the product now looks very windows 95, and is
more stable and uses less resources than ever before.

In addition there are now DDE links provided by the product to integrate
with other windows programs and toolbar functionality.  From version 1.90
the product also has a global editor so that you can make global edits
to your application.  That aside since 1.11 that Glenn used the terminal
emulation has been radically re-coded and redesigned, the termcap files
and map files have been totally re-written and now work extremely well,
Switching from screen to screen is now much improved too and CA have
provided a number of patches to version 6.4/06 and above to help
performance in tablefields, and to improve the MWS protocol which
UpFront runs against.  (The Ingres MWS protocol allows upfront to do
what it does,  over telnet sessions).

Type ahead is also greatly improved, if you haven't seen the product for
a while or are just curious then I would urge you to get an evaluation
copy.  There has been a lot of work, of late put into the product to
make it what it is, today and it would be a shame not to see people
trying the product and letting us know what they think.  

Thanks

Kelly Woodhead
CACI Upfront Team
kellyw@caci.co.uk

see:

http://www.caci.co.uk/products/consult/upfront.htm

http://www.jema.demon.co.uk/
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