DBMS, December 1996
In Joe Celko's column entitled "Everything You Know Is Wrong" (see DBMS, August 1996, page 18), he notes some of our company's CHAOS research on application development failures. The research pointed to the fact that smaller companies are more successful at projects than the largest companies, and Joe asked for readers' thoughts as to why this would be true.
Our research gave us a good idea of why this was true -- it showed that smaller projects have a higher success rate than larger projects. In general, smaller companies do smaller projects. We also found that "smaller project milestones" lead to success in large projects. Therefore, large projects can succeed, but they should be broken up into these smaller milestones.
Anyone interested in viewing the whole CHAOS report should look on our Web site at http://www.standishgroup.com.
Karen D. Boucher
The Standish Group
karen@standishgroup.com
I appreciated David S. Linthicum's article "Tool Time." (See Internet Systems, October 1996, page 15.) It gave a good synopsis of available options and future directions for Web application development tools.
His statement about plug-ins subsiding in favor of Java and ActiveX applies well to new development, but doesn't he think that plug-ins may survive because they allow existing applications to become Web-enabled without redevelopment?
Mulraj Gala
mulraj.gala@gs.com
Most major development tools are moving to Java and ActiveX. Unify, for example, will deploy existing Unify application to Java, and PowerBuilder is moving to ActiveX. There are many more examples.
Most of these migrations are made without code changes. Thus, it's just as easy to re-deploy applications in Java and ActiveX as with plug-ins.
-- David S. Linthicum
Michael Gora may have started in client/server with SQLWindows, but he certainly hasn't kept up with the product's feature set. Specifically, I refer to his misstatement, "For example, in SQLWindows, sheets and response windows cannot have common ancestors . . ." (see DBMS, September 1996, page 63).
General Window Classes were added to SQLWindows 5.0 (which was released more than two years ago) specifically to support common ancestor classes for visual window classes. The class hierarchy described in the article (and shown in Figure 2) is certainly doable in SQLWindows.
David Burke
Centura Software
David.Burke@centurasoft.com
We apologize for the error and appreciate the clarification.
-- Ed.