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From: zrm@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: 4th Dimension
Message-ID: <7595@eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 6-Dec-87 13:49:21 EST
Article-I.D.: eddie.7595
Posted: Sun Dec  6 13:49:21 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Dec-87 06:22:39 EST
References: <456@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Reply-To: zrm@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks)
Organization: MIT, EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 55

Capsule review of Fourth Dimention:

Design tools: Very nice! My firm is using FD right now in a project at
Bose with a business consultant from another consulting firm. She
keeps changing her mind about what she wants in the database. No
problem, in FD you just reconnect the lines (as long as you don't have
more than a couple thousand records -- then changing your mind can get
tedious). All this reconnecting can go on even while the database
programming is being done.

User interface: So so. It would, for instance, be nice to specify the
presence or absence of scroll bars in the inteface design subsystem,
but this is left to optional flags which maddeningly are not
implemented in all ways that one can arrive at a given input screen. A
few small details like this keep FD applications from looking like
real Mac applications. Too bad.

Network capability: If it works as well as it seems to, it is the best
I have seen in any Mac application. You simply open your FD database
from another network node and you have a multi-user transaction
processing system. No effort at all. This is, to me, the most
impressive feature of the system.

Programming language: "ooh ick!" as Penfold would say. Yet another
bastardized programming language. Too many data types, too few generic
operators that work on all the data types you would expect them to
work on. Sets, which are not like selections, which are not like
subselections (and there is no "sub-set"), and which are all different
from the current record (which might or might not be actually in the
current selection, I think) all are manipulated with different sets of
commands, even though they are all groups of records in database
files. You can "call out" to external functions, but there is no
access methods libraray that would let one access an FD database from
another Mac application.

Performance: Acceptable, but slow compared to Omnis3, this according
to CPN, Inc. an Apple VAR that considered porting their VAR products
to FD from Omnis. At Bose, we shall see if it is possible to keep
track of over 1 million customers. If it is, they will move this data
off their minis and on to MacIIs. A major coup for Macs in business --
if it works. I'll be impressed if it does work.

Summary: It is the best there is, but it could be a lot better. My
firm will be lookng at Inside Out, an RDMS implemented as a library
for C and Pascal programs to use. This is what we really need to
implement business applications both quickly and with a real Mac user
interface. In the mean time, Fourth Dimention looks like the tool of
choice.

-Zigurd
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Zigurd Mednieks		   MURSU Corporation		(617)424-0146
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