Commenting on subject, Alan said:

> .... I have mixed feelings on the Buyout.

> HP have always made wonderful hardware, but their applications
> have always been dogged by failures to continue development.

I would respectfully disagree a bit on one of the products Alan
mentioned:

> Transact was a very good 3.5GL language, when they bought it,
> but none of the development it needed really ever happened.

It's very true that there was the "on - off - on again" fiasco with
Transact support and enhancement back in the days of Interex -
Boston 1990;  and the short period around the time of HP World -
Anaheim in 1996 when we were again in a "no more Transact
enhancements" interlude because of the continued slow decline
in the customer base (initially aided and abetted to no small
degree by the aforementioned 1990 fiasco).

In fact, since 1990 HP has implemented a large number of
functional enhancements to Transact/iX that were on the
SIGRAPID enhancement list, that fell within what I would call
the "current scope" of the product;  i.e.:  we did not get direct
SQL support in Transact (which in retrospect now is probably
just as well).  And Transact is not the best "fit" for handling
sockets-based client-server I/O on the net (look at Java/iX or
C/iX or GNU C++ to do that).  But for TurboIMAGE database
I/O on the 3000, IMNSHO Transact is still hard to beat.

Anyway, for the record the HP RAPID Lab in Roseville is still
working on two important additional enhancements to
Transact/iX, that I believe will be released sometime in 1999:

(1)  High-level support for all TurboIMAGE access modes;
including IMAGE intrinsic B-Trees and TPI.

(2)  What HP calls "Open Transact":  The ability to efficiently
call Transact/iX from other languages by passing in external
database and file ID's.  This will avoid the current inefficiency of
having Transact re-open databases and files when it is called
from other languages;  and should be a big help in running
servers written in C/iX or G++ that call Transact to do the
database I/O.


But, to be fair I would also add that after the above two in-process
enhancements are delivered, I wouldn't expect HP to deliver a lot
of additional new features in Transact/iX....

Ken Sletten