A Question emailed to me

Below is the text of an email I received today, and while I will answer privately, I have a lot of experience with WD (8 years) that may color my opinions and advice to him (I'm only human and will admit I may have bias' that I may not recognize - and I'd hate to do a disservice to him or Wx). What will be of some assistance to him is to give his request some exposure here so all of you have a chance to answer, ESPECIALLY some of the newer folks here with a similar background as his.

For instance, what little French may have been missed by PCS is not important to me, while someone else here may find it a major irritant that is not overcome by all of the great built in functionality in the product (therein shows a bias by me...).

Thanks in advance for your honest reply to the gentleman.

--- text of email ---

I am considering the Windev/Webdev products and wanted to ask your (unbiased!) advice. I have been sent a number of ads for version 12 and wondered how French/English it is? I know that the English version tends to lag a bit, its not something that worries me but wanted to know which version is usable for a non-French speaker. Am I right in thinking that the distributed products are all royalty free and do require any runtimes? What is your experience in terms of effort to learn the system/language coming from a Clarion/Delphi/VB background? Particularly for someone who is used to writing (in the case of something like Clarion) a lot of hand-written code (particularly reports), makes extensive use of things like queues etc? As I am sure you are aware, the move to a new development platform, and here I am considering either WinDev or Alpha Five, is something that nobody does lightly and over the years one falls into comfortable ways of doing things with old tools, even if they could be achieved far more quickly with more modern ones. The fact that one first needs to learn the new tool in order to understand that a problem is simple to solve often makes one stick to what we are comfortable with.

Well, the French hardly caused me any issues so far. The only little slips was some message boxes with the French Ok and Cancel buttons, and some French error messages when I ran the application into the ground using external .NET applications which were badly written by third parties (I dropped them now and redone it in Windev).

Alpha Five is a web development enviroment , but I found Ironspeed designer to be better. Webdev give you so many other ways to develop cool features with minimal effort using the WL Language. And with WB12 the features and benefits are now enough for me to move away from Ironspeed and similar products.
Just to name a few benefits for using WB12:- WL Language instead of complex Javascript, Web Graph components which registers click events (This is optional, but customers like a drilldown graph!), easy learning curve, easy AJAX scripting using WL Language makes asynch calls a breeze! and much more i cant think about right now.

The same goes for Windev - from a cost perspective you get a fully functional IDE to develop in, no need to buy 3rd party controls and widgets to make your app looks pro(think of Visual Studio, to really stand out in the crowd you need to invest in Ifragistics just to get a graph and grid facility on par with what you get natively in Windev!).

As an addition you also get a RAD methodology and project control centre which also allows a team to share source and make modifications on one project at the same time.

All these little things add up, and really outweighs using other development platforms to develop nice looking applications, that WILL work (forgot to mention the test automation built in) when deployed!

I heartily second Ben's comments.

I programmed for years in Clarion and the difference between it and WinDev is huge.

As Ben said everything is "in the box". You don't need any third party tools. The only other tools I use are Help & Manual and LinderSoft's SetupBuilder. I use SetupBuilder instead of the built-in installer because I get more control.

I have been using WinDev for about 3 years and I am able to do all I want to do in creating my apps, with no third party tools.

The things I like best are: the ability to test an app without compiling it; access to the data files from within the IDE; easy access to the analysis, Clarion's dictionary; etc.

You will not be disappointed in WinDev. :spos:

And, the peer support is outstanding!

I came from a Clarion background (6 years) and also used Alpha software for many years, including version 5. However, to me, there is no comparison between these products and Windev which I have now been using for 3 years.

To date I have found Windev able to do anything I wanted without any add ons or runtime royalty's and when I have needed help I have always been able to get it on the forum.

I am sure some people will criticise Windev, and in reality nothing is perfect, but whatever minor issues I have encountered there has always been a way around them and I have not even considered another product since changing over to Windev at version 9.

Milton

Our company is in the process of moving from Clarion to WinDev, WebDev for some of our applications. While I'm not yet ready to drop over 20 years of Clarion Experience for all our applicatiions, I am very impressed with WinDev.

Some of the Positives:
1- Incredible IDE with dictionary integration.
2- Very feature complete. There is not the need for 3rd party products.
3- The debugger is lightyears ahead of anything else I have used.
4- Very easy to make a pretty application
5- The users on this forum are amazing. They are helpful and generous. I don't see the personal attacks I see on some other groups.

Some of the Negatives:
1- You must purchase a per server license for Native MSSQL support. This is the main reason why we have not moved all our applications to WinDev.
2- You must purchase a per server application server for WebDev for all installations of more than 10 concurrent users.
3- Some French error messages make me crazy. There are not a lot but when they show up in a development process somethimes it is hard to solve the problem.
4- Lack of 3rd party developers. I would like to see alot more "Super Controls" available.
5- .NET development is limited to assembly genertion rather than full applications.

thanks for listening to my rambles. Remember I am very new to WinDev so I have have things wrong.

Hyrum