Where to go after Informix 4GL?
We have a large homebrew ERP system written in Informix 4GL.
We are currently running old hardware from Sun, Solaris 8 and 10 year old 4GL and Informix.
We need to move on, and one option is obviously getting the latest 4GL and Informix installed on new hardware (maybe Linux / Intel).
However, I believe there are options for porting 4GL programs to other development platforms. Anyone have any experience? If so, what platforms, how did it go, what are the pros and cons?
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Moving to I4GL 7.50 on Linux poses almost no problems. If you have a 10 year old version of I4GL, you can use 7.30 instead of 7.31 or newer. In this case, you may have to watch out for "big renaming" of C functions in the I4GL runtime library. If you are using C code, you need to make sure that all such files use the 'fglsys.h' header. Besides, it should be download, compilation, transition.
I4GL 7.50 adds some (rudimentary) SOA support. You can publish I4GL functions as web services, and you can subscribe to I4GL programs for web services.
If you want to keep the I4GL code, but move to a different interface, the main choice is:
The first two are commercial; the latter is Open Source.
If you want to do without the I4GL code, then the world is your oyster - there are many options for the database and tools to access it.
From the comment, you are using I4GL 7.30 - released in 1998 I believe. If you are using normal p-code (no custom runners) then the update should be "recompile and go". If you've used a custom runner, you'll need to look at your C code to make sure you have " #include "fglsys.h"
" at the top of your files (but you can automate to add it).
Various automatic translation tools were created in Java - one was a company called Artinsoft and the other was IBM EGL. Suffice it to say, "there are problems."
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I'm a bias, but we've been working with IBM for many years to help Informix DB companies migrate to 4GL. If you haven't heard of GeneXus, check it out. Just today we did a demo for the Informix group where we read the db "store" design (as well as the demo) and GeneXus automatically generated about 30 plus screens for the web and showed that it was running on Android and iPhone in less than an hour. It will surely take a few weeks or a month to do it manually.
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